This post is a frank account of what I managed to accomplish in 2025 alongside full-time work and a new born, what worked, what didn’t, and what I’m intentionally focusing on next.
I started the Mace Labs website, Mace Labs YouTube channel and Gaming Seeds side project all at the at the start of 2025. None have been breakaway success but none have been time badly spent.
I have always tinkered in my spare time on one side project or another. While that effort is not lost, there is no record of it other than my own recollection. Mace Labs (Website and YouTube channel) are now the permanent glimpses into my endeavours.
When I started all of this, I had just had a 6 week old daughter. As any parent knows, free time is a luxury. Given the constraints, I consider this year a significant success. Without documenting any of it, I’m not sure I would have reflected on the year and realised just how much I had accomplished.
Mace Labs YouTube Channel
At the start of the year, I had never been on camera, I had never written a script, I had never edited a video and I had never created a thumbnail. This year I have published 8 videos, totalling ~78 minutes of content to my YouTube channel.
From these videos, I have generated 819 views, 33.1 hours of watched time, 10 Subscribers and 1 comment.
The last video I published was on 3rd November. Despite not publish anything since then, across my 8 videos, I generated exactly 100 views in December. This feels like the the first signs of a back catalogue of videos becoming self-sustaining if I hit a critical mass.
At the start of the year, I thought I would be able to produce 1 video a week. This was very unrealistic. Script writing, video recording, editing and thumbnail creation takes so much time! Especially the editing! Throughout 2025, I have gotten better and faster but they still take a very long time. My hunch is that for every minute of video content, it probably takes me about 3-4 hours to produce.
I know that volume is critical for YouTube but I have to be realistic in what I can produce given the time I have available. My family will always be the number 1 priority. After that, I have a commitment to work. Third I have my side projects. My already limited time for side projects is again divided to across multiple projects (YouTube, this website, GamingSeeds.com and BetShrew.com).
I recognise that this is not ideal, but my hope, as it was at the start of the year, is that each of these projects will eventually form a feedback loop with each project driving traffic to each other. Gaming Seeds will give me a source to generate content. That content will then allow me to create YouTube videos and blog posts. The YouTube channel and blog posts will drive traffic to each other and siphon off a subset of visitors/views to Gaming Seeds.
I still wouldn’t call my videos “good” but I am getting better and I can produce them quicker than I could at the start of the year. My objective for 2026 is to produce 1 piece of long form (10+ mins) content per month. This is 4 more videos and 42 minutes more than I did last year.
In addition to this, I want to better leverage my existing and new YouTube content. I will therefore aim to produce at least 2 shorts per video and post on X/Twitter at least twice per week. YouTube is currently the top of my funnel but I want to widen and add some more layers to that funnel. The content is already there and this strategy should hopefully allow me to quickly repurpose it without much additional effort.
Mace Labs Website
Throughout 2025, this site received 667 users. I wrote 10 pieces of content.
The most popular pages on the site were:
| Page | Publication Date | Total Users | Avg. Session Duration |
| Install NPM packages in .NET | Jan 22nd | 87 | 21s |
| Publish test results on PRs | Feb 13th | 60 | 2m 52s |
| Deploy to Azure with GitHub Actions | Mar 17th | 55 | 57s |
| Google Antigravity Workflows | Nov 23rd | 22 | 2m 39s |
| Set up Google Analytics in .NET | Jul 21st | 9 | 8s |
| Containerize a .NET and SQL Server app | Nov 3rd | 6 | 8s |
The majority of the above is companion content for the YouTube videos that I published. The draw being access to the actual code showcased in the videos. Each posts also provides a stand alone written tutorial so that the post can stand alone without the video.
To be honest, I am a little sceptical about the above data for for 2 reasons:
- My own visits likely skewed the numbers.
- There is a great deal of direct traffic to pages that were not indexed in Google and only linked to from YouTube. I therefore believe that referral YouTube referral traffic is being misattributed as “Direct”.
For 2026, I will look to exclude my own personal browsing, and look to gain better referral attribution by using UTM links from YouTube and social media posts.
Interestingly, with the exception of the Antigravity post, all of the above were linked from YouTube and didn’t get indexed by Google until December. The Antigravity post didn’t have an accompanying YouTube video but I manually submitted it for Indexing. It was picked up by Google pretty quickly and all of the traffic has been organic.
I haven’t really cared about SEO. I falsely thought that given that I had set up a Search Console account and submitted an XML sitemap, Google would eventually get around to indexing the site. 11 months later, that still hadn’t happened. Clearly I was wrong.
In 2026, I will ensure that all posts have have a keyword optimised H1, title tag, and a meta description. After publishing each post, I will also manually submit them to Google for Indexing.
The primary driver of written content will continue to be companion content to the YouTube videos as it is very quick to rework a YouTube video into a written tutorial.
Gaming Seeds Development
Developing Gaming Seeds has been where most of my time has been spent this year. At the start of the year, Gaming Seed didn’t have a single line of code written. Over the year I have built out the following:
- Set up new project
- Deployed to Azure with separate prod and test environments and databases
- Continuous integration pipeline
- Continue deployment pipeline
- Custom .NET client side package management solution
- Themed and styled the site
- Application Insights integration
- Alerting
- Background jobs
- Bundling and minification
- Content Security Policy
- Email Sending
- Enforcing single accessible URL middleware for SEO
- Custom HTTP status code pages
- Google Analytics
- Key Vault integration
- Pagination
- Set up .NET Identity and related workflows:
- Registration
- Login
- Logout
- User Settings
- Email verification
- Password reset
- Change password
- Delete account
- Public profile pages
- Minecraft seed sharing functionality:
- Seed submission
- Read seed
- Edit seed
- Delete seed
- Seed feed
- Sorting
- Reddit style voting
- Version management
- Epoch timelines
I have not generated anywhere near as much content from this as I could have. There is a large amount of work to draw upon. It’s just that dev work is where I am comfortable and where I get my most enjoyment.
I am pretty close to having an MVP. I think I should be able to have one in the next couple of months. The core functionality left to implement for an MVP is:
- User and post moderation
- Image management
- Tagging
- Seed searching
My plan is to:
- Get an MVP working
- Create a content generation pipeline
- Implement commenting
I need an MVP for the site to be functionally useable. Even if the site functions, it will provide no value, unless it has a library of seeds for users to browse and search. Finally, while not technically needed, I think commenting will allow the site to build a self sustaining community. It will therefore be the next piece of functionality that I will implement.
Gaming Seeds is a fun project, but other than being a source of YouTube content for me, I don’t see any way to monetise and make it even break even. I therefore need to move a way from this projects as soon as possible. I think it is realistic to achieve the above objectives within the first half of 2026. After that, I will look to move to a coding project that I think I have more opportunity to monetize.
Bet Shrew
I have spent zero time on Bet Shrew in 2025. Despite this, the Poker Odds Calculator had 1.4k users in 2025. I think, given the industry that this site operates in, this in the side project has the most opportunity to generate a return. Once I have accomplished my objectives for Gaming Seeds, this is where I intend to invest most of my dev time.
Plan for 2026
Below I outline my plan for 2026. It would be easy to say things like “I plan to grow my YouTube channel to x subscribers” but I have no way to control metrics like this. Instead, I will outline objectives that I have direct control over. For instance I can produce 1 video per month. The measure of success for this will be whether my subscriber count grows.
YouTube
Objectives
- 1 long form (10mins+) piece of content per month
- At least 2 Shorts generated from each piece of long form content
Measures of success:
- Views (819 views in 2025)
- Subscribers (10 subscribers of 1st Jan 2026)
- Number of comments (1 comment in 2025)
Objectives:
- Identify a tool for post scheduling
- Post a minimum of twice per week
Measures of success:
- Follower (116 follows as on 1st Jan 2026)
- Traffic driven to Mace Labs YouTube channel and Website
Website
Objectives:
- Primary focus will continue to companion based content for the YouTube videos
- Exclude personal browsing from analytics data
- Use UTM links when linking back to the site
- Ensure all posts have a keyword optimised
Measures of success:
- Unique Users
- Traffic by source
Gaming Seeds
Objectives:
- Implement an MVP
- Produce an content generation pipeline
- Implement commenting
Measures of success:
- Unique Users
- Number of seeds submitted per day
Bet Shrew
Objectives:
- Create a feature that can be monetised
Measures of success
- Unique Users
- Revenue
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