Strategy Update December 2025

Every year, I aim to release a strategy update to reflect on what went well before and how I plan to make my videos

YOUTUBE INSPIRATIONS

12/5/202510 min read

Since we're in December, I thought it's time to do another year of reflection of my videos of the year.
What's new in this year's strategy update is that I aim to reflect on each video uploaded to learn from every upload, so that the lessons are preserved for future reference and should ideally be applied in my current way of making videos.

Sambal

This is the first video where I tried to outsource the text to a designer on Fiverr. The brief was to create a text that represents the soul of Sambal well. It turned out quite nice and does meet expectations. The thumbnail design is inspired by Sheldo's Kitchen on his Lemon Bars video where text points out highlights of the dish. The font is too thin though so it could be thicker.

But overall this video outperformed because it attracted a crowd of Malays, especially from Malaysia (no.1) and Indonesia (no.2) who eagerly share their point of view on how they make their own sambal. I still have much to learn about the art of sambal, like deep frying the ikan bilis first instead of putting them straight in, or toasting the belachan.

I’m heartened to see my video referenced in a reddit post of someone wanting to learn about sambal. A redditor replied with a link to my video and commented that it’s also ranking as one of the top few videos for “sambal”.

I’m glad this fulfilled my purpose of sharing what I learnt as a guide, not a guru, not a teacher, not an educator, but just a chef sharing his learnings and experiments at home, so others could benefit from this.

Fried Chicken

This is the longest video I’ve made so far, stacking as many experiments in a logical sequence as possible, hoping people could follow along. As this is one of the most popular food items, fried chicken, I heavily invested in this video, but it did not perform quite as expected. Most people who watched are from USA (49%) and are of the older generation who have the patience to watch through all experiments. Retention curve is one of the lowest, around 20%+ down to 10+% to 9%-8% at the end.

I think this video taught me not to stack too much in one video as my style is not really attracting the crowd of 25-40 years old that I’m looking for. So try not to go above 40 minutes video.

But I still took away some valuable learnings, especially on working with frying oil so this prepares me well for frying other foods in future.

Malaysia Travels 2024

This is the first travel vlog I did to capture my experiences in Malaysia. I was thinking hard whether it’s worth capturing or documenting my experiences as I’m not really a travel vlogger, but I hope in future I could actually do deep dive documentaries to trace the origins of food and discover how our food is actually made at source, like fishing, farming chickens, etc.

This episode is more focused on durians. I also paid for a video graphic of a map and a car to trace my journey, since I thought it was quite an epic journey to go from one town to another in a packed schedule.

Overall the performance is as expected, mostly fans from the region Malaysia and Singapore tuned in. Retention curve is in the 20+%, and most people actually viewed this on TV. Most are also not subscribers so I think this video is more in the vlog and travel space as expected.

Should I make more travel videos? I don’t know. I think this is something I should ask my audience if they’re interested or not. It took substantial work to produce it. I thought of also giving hints to future videos, but turns out to not really be that valuable as people would just expect Asian food videos anyway. But I still hope to record my memories of my travels and add diversity to my videos so I think I should still try to record my travels.

This video was also outsourced to an editor as I didn’t feel inspired to edit it, and I also wanted to see if a local eye could pick out what’s interesting too, and the video edit turned out fine. Paid about RM1000 for this video edit with 2 video editors.

Fried Chicken

I thought of making a rice video using a thumbnail following the concept of evolution of man from apes, but here it’s rice grains from raw to moist. It’s interesting to see how the video retention curve is pretty high in the 30s, but the view count is low, so this suggests the topic is very niche and only interests a few people, and those few people actually watch most of it. Audience is quite diversified across countries, and half are existing subscribers, so I think this served the subscribers base well, even though it did not attract a large crowd of people.

This video showed that a high retention curve is not a guarantee for high views. What attracts people more are the title and thumbnail to draw people in.

Fried Chicken

This video is one of my long awaited video to make nasi lemak from freshly squeezed coconut milk. Most video I’ve seen on the internet use boxed coconut milk so I was expecting my video to stand out in that regard, so much so that I intentionally placed a clip of grinding fresh coconut in the first few seconds of the video.

While the video did ok, I was hoping it would draw more views from other nasi lemak videos. But it didn’t and it came mostly from my own videos. Only about 1% of traffic came from other videos suggesting my video. But still, it could pop up on someone’s feed after watching many nasi lemak videos, so I wouldn’t discount this effect.

Overall I was hoping this video would do better but it fell slightly below expectations compared to other nasi lemak videos, perhaps because the length is too long in the 30 minutes mark. Someone also commented it was “carthartic” to finally see the final dish plated together after watching through the experiments from the rice, to the ayam goreng, peanuts, ikan bilis, egg. If I had another chance to do this video, I would try to simplify it to be in the 20 minutes range.

  • What is my mission that will motivate and inspire me to make more videos about?

    I aim to make videos about Asian food that I’m interested in and that Natasha likes to eat. I eventually want to open a food business, from a hawker stall and eventually a full service restaurant like Fallow in London. So the videos I’m making now are the videos that I want to make before I venture into the food business. By then, my videos would be quite different as it would be making food at a commercial scale. My home would be a test kitchen to test recipes before bulking up for mass production.

    So I’ve lined up some 20+ videos so far that I want to make and it might take another 2 years to finish them. The videos chosen are in order of value to my audience. Some are in response to early video requests which I’ve soft-committed to produce them, like a followup to my most popular chicken rice videos. Others are aspirational dishes that I hope to make in my restaurant or at least home dining some day. But at least I’ve gotten the basic nasi lemak video out which I hope to offer people to taste my videos through a coffee shop stall, where it’s slightly bigger than a hawker stall.

    • Who do I want to engage
      I want to engage people of my generation from 20s to 40s worldwide who are interested in food, especially Asian food. I also want to attract a local crowd who are foodies so that they would want to try my food business when it opens. Currently Singapore accounts for about 10% of my viewers.

    • What do people want
      People want to see pretty food shot beautifully and in-depth food tutorials on how to make them in a quick and easy way.
      People want to see personality too and connect with YouTubers. People whom I know personally are surprised and eager to speak to me after learning that I have a YouTube channel, so it shows that people like to connect with me also.

    • What do I want
      I want to make popular dishes taste good or even better at home, made from scratch to understand why it tastes good and how to make it better. I want to create visual guides for people and also my future self to refer to so that we can make consistently good food at home. I also want to make kitchen design tutorials and reviews on commercial equipment as I enter a new career in food. I want to document my learnings and share with others about this niche in commercial food business which I see lacking in the social media space, but a thriving opportunity like Fallow restaurant does it.

    • Why do I want to do this
      It’s hard to make something in-depth, quick, and easy at the same time so it’s a challenge that I want to try. Recently for the fried rice video, I found this is possible using simple tools: a plastic bottle and a thermometer probe to get it going. I cut out an earlier attempt to use plastic cups without the squeezing function as it wasn’t really interesting and adds to the video length without sufficient benefit.

  • What type of videos should I make over the next few months?
    So I’ve prioritised followup videos to my chicken rice video series, and I should do a video on pork also since it’s quite niche to Chinese dishes. I also want to make kitchen design home tour before opening up my home to home dining, and also document the designs of this home dining experience. More local food to come and deep dives into making them good, fast, and easy at home.

    • What value do I bring to my audience
      From the comments, people appreciate the video guides to help them make the dishes successfully at home. But most people who watch my videos probably don’t cook at home, so it satisfies their curiosity on making certain dishes. When I open my actual physical food business, I hope to bring value to my audience by showing how I make the dishes, and how they could also make it at home if they want. This helps people understand the value that they’re getting, time saved, and appreciate the ingredients and effort that go into preparing a dish worth paying for.

  • How should my videos look and sound?

    • Thumbnails
      Thumbnails should be inspired by trending thumbnails of other creators that I admire and look up to. It should present food in a glorious way to entice people to learn more about it.

    • Titles
      Titles should be simple, easy to understand, not over-the-top nor exaggerated. I still like using the X hour food series and using sound bites or catchy phrases for other videos

    • Scene
      Half body height still works to focus on the food. Some behind-the-scenes are interesting also for a few glimpses. Comparison clips, comparison images, and good visuals continue to drive most of the scene.

    • Graphics
      Simple easy to read subtitles. Big title in the top center is not always needed. Try to make the good visuals self-explanatory and the differences obvious so there’s no need to title them. A voice guide is sufficient to explain them.

    • Voiceover
      I try to be at my natural sounding voice but in a polished way to explain stuff to people between formal and informal at a social meeting. It’s like at a radio station explaining to the DJ and people listening over the radio how I do stuff. It should also have a relaxed vibe to let people absorb the knowledge in a friendly safe learning space. I hope to steer away from the commercial voice which worked well in the past for my videos and Fiverr gig, but recently people who’ve watched my videos couldn’t really reconcile my actual voice to my videos, so I hope to reduce that gap and improve my actual speaking voice to be less informal and more deliberate, while relaxing my voiceover read to be gentler and easy to listen.

    • Music
      I recently understood the local composer I was going for, Li Xiao An, charges in the range of $1300 per minute of composed music. The rate could be negotiable if I show sincere interest, but I still expect maybe $1k to $2k to compose like a 2 minutes music piece to loop throughout my videos. As my voiceover is still changing, the composed music may not fit my future state and also the future videos that I intend to make about the commercial food business. Meanwhile, monthly subscription to epidemic sound are at like $124 per year which works out to be like $20 per music track, assuming I make 5 videos in a year, or $10 per music track for 10+ videos. Which, I think is alright, but I’m still not sure yet what kind of music vibe suits me. That’s why I wish to compose a piece of music to just use in all of my videos. But I’m holding off for now due to lack of budget and business case. Some channels I look up to have no music also, like Adam Ragusea, Chinese Cooking Demystified, Souped Up Recipes, and they are more of a educational channel rather than entertainment. But I hope to veer slightly more towards the entertainment space but still remain in the educational space, like Fallow’s videos.

    • Sounds
      Sounds are still limited to ambient sounds from cooking, like frying oil, metal clanging etc. and minimise bird sounds in voiceovers. Still include an audio clip from Natasha for her thoughts and impressions after trying my food.

  • What are the current challenges I’m facing to achieve all of the above?

    I just need more time and focus to make videos as currently I’m making around 5 videos a year only. I hope to double that by making at least 1 video a month, so I could do 12 videos in a year. I need to simplify my videos process from the script standpoint to keep the video length concise to be under 30 minutes and still retain the in-depth visual guides to make food easily and quickly.

    Outsourcing editing isn’t quite possible yet as I still have to actively edit the script to fit the footage, while editing the footage to fit the script. It’s a two way struggle, whereas an editor works best when the script is fixed. So I do all the editing myself so I’m satisfied with both the script and visuals.

    I’m also trying to improve the script by using more curiosity hooks and setups to make them interesting to listen to.

Subscribe to stay updated

Subscribe to my free newsletter to stay updated on any new blog posts. You can unsubscribe anytime, no hard feelings.