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Shep 4 Newsletter — October 2026

Welcome to the fourth Shep 4 Newsletter!

This month I’m diving deep into video production, and specifically into how much easier it has gotten. I published my first YouTube video, and the tools I found along the way have genuinely changed what I think a one-person video workflow can look like.

Review of Last Month

Last month’s Project of the Month was Project One Video, and it’s done. You can watch it here: How to Build an AI Trainer That Writes Your Workouts.

The more useful part is what making it taught me. Years ago I made YouTube videos for my research lab, and it was miserable. Scrub through hours of footage, find the moment you stopped fumbling, cut it, stitch it to the next piece, discover the audio is out of sync, start over. It took days and the results were mediocre.

This time it took hours, and almost none of that time was spent editing! Two takeaways if you’re thinking about making videos yourself:

  1. Spend your money on hardware, not software. Recording straight into a laptop is unusable. About $100 of equipment — a cheap green screen, a ring light, a phone stand, and a teleprompter app — did more for the final quality than every piece of software combined. Put your budget into lighting first. And don’t buy a nice green screen, because AI segmentation has made backdrop quality almost irrelevant.

  2. You don’t need a video editor anymore. I never opened one. I read the script in a single continuous take and repeated any line I flubbed, then let a script find the good takes by looking for repeated phrases in the transcript. AI handled the background removal, and the video itself was assembled in code. The tedious part of video editing is essentially solved.

I wrote up the full process, including the mistakes, in Project One Video: How I Made My First Video. If you’d like a walkthrough of the whole setup, reply and tell me — I’d happily put one together, because this is genuinely one of the cooler things I’ve built this year!

Moving Forward

This month’s Project of the Month is Project Ten Reels, where the goal is to expand on Project One Video by filming and publishing ten short-form videos.

This is the natural next step from last month. I now have a repeatable way to make long-form video, and the whole reason I started with long-form is that short-form content is supposed to come out of it. The plan is to turn my Wednesday Python tips into narrated reels, then start posting them and expanding onto platforms beyond LinkedIn.

To put this in context of the larger plan: I’m trying to build an audience before I need one. The projects and products are coming, and I’ve been working on several of them in the background, but a launch only works if there are people around to see it. So the order of operations is to build the distribution first — YouTube last month, reels this month, more platforms after that — and then start posting the projects themselves into a place where they’ll actually reach somebody.

Articles

Final Thoughts

Thanks for reading! I appreciate your support and feedback. If you reply to this email, I will see it.

In honor of publishing my first video, here’s a fun fact: the first video ever uploaded to YouTube is still up. It’s called “Me at the zoo”, it was posted by co-founder Jawed Karim on April 23, 2005, and it is 19 seconds of a guy standing in front of some elephants. Everybody starts somewhere.