In 18 months, my team’s technical YouTube channel grew from 0 to 3.2 million monthly views, driving 42% of our SaaS product’s trial signups. But we wasted $27k in the first 6 months on manual workflows, broken SEO, and unoptimized video pipelines. Here’s every lesson we learned, backed by code, benchmarks, and post-mortems from 127 published videos. 📡 Hacker News Top Stories Right Now The map that keeps Burning Man honest (374 points) Agents need control flow, not more prompts (89 points) AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields (168 points) DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal (114 points) Natural Language Autoencoders: Turning Claude's Thoughts into Text (23 points) Key Insights Automated video metadata pipelines reduce upload prep time from 47 minutes to 8 minutes per video (82% reduction) YouTube Data API v3 with python-youtube 1.0.12 outperforms manual uploads by 12x throughput Self-hosted transcription with Whisper large-v3 cuts per-video cost from $4.50…