Launching yabby — websites for YouTube creators

Today I'm launching yabby, a website builder that turns a YouTube channel into a beautiful website in minutes. Pick a theme, connect your channel, publish on your own domain. It's built for YouTube creators and podcasters, with six themes, automatic syncing, custom domains, and support for multiple channels from day one.

Indie Hackers, built with the Default theme

Syntax, built with the Terminal theme

It feels like a small thing, but I've been circling this idea for almost ten years.

2016 — Awesome React

I launched Awesome React when I was learning React and watching dozens of YouTube tutorials a week. I wanted to remember which ones were good and share them. So I built a site, curated the videos I liked, and published it.

It picked up some traction. Then I lost momentum and let it drift. But the site kept getting traffic, over 2k page views a month, even after years without updates. That was the first lesson: a website built around YouTube content, indexed properly, compounds for a long time.

Circling back to the same idea

After Awesome React I launched Awesome Next.js. Same format, narrower niche, weekly newsletter. Then in 2021 I wrote a tutorial walking through how to build a YouTube channel website from scratch in Next.js, with the best kitesurfing channels as the example.

Three angles on the same idea. I kept ending up there.

Discovering RIVYT

Somewhere along the way I stumbled on RIVYT: "Websites for video creators." Their pitch was nearly identical to where I was heading: turn a YouTube channel into a website in five minutes. They shipped steady updates from 2017 through 2019, then went quiet.

They were onto something, but the product didn't get continued. I wanted that thing to exist again.

2026 — yabby

So I built it.

Yabby puts creators first. Pick from six themes (Default, Spotlight, Magazine, Showcase, Extreme Sport, Terminal), connect your channel, and publish on your own domain. It automatically syncs new uploads, supports multiple channels on one site, and lets you pin or hide videos to shape your homepage.

The fastest way to see what's possible is the example sites I built for Lex Fridman, Syntax, Indie Hackers, and TED.

Set up your site for free. Upgrade to publish your videos.

What's next

Curation is where this all started. Now I'm coming back to it.

Yabby already lets you pull videos from multiple channels onto one site. But playlists are the missing piece for any serious curator, and they're what I'm tackling next.

After that:

• Newsletters. A way to capture email signups and ship updates from your site.
• Sponsor placements. Sponsor slots built into the site for creators who want to monetize without leaving the platform.
• AI newsletters. Further out, automatic weekly drafts written by AI based on a creator's recent uploads.

Building in public starts now.

Follow along

Try it at yabby.page. I'll post updates at @itsakeller on X as I build yabby in public, with longer posts here. If you're a creator with thoughts on what would make yabby useful for you, reply on X or email me.