Now all I get in support requests is the occasional account management email, and those are pretty streamlined at this point. (I could eliminate nearly all of them by creating a proper account management page, rather than directing people to email me, but given the number of requests I get, the cost of doing that is way higher than just handling it by email.)
It helps that the screencast is aimed at more advanced developers. But that's also why it didn't end up being viable in the long term, I think. That and the "long play" format, I suspect.
The “Lessons Learned” channel was more elaborate. The video at objectplayground.com [1] is my most popular example. For those, I would make slides and animations in Keynote, then record while playing the slides. I had an outline, but not a script, as I felt that made the narration less stilted. Sometimes that resulted in minor mistakes going into the video. For more serious ones, I would record a new line and edit it into the video.
In all cases, I would edit out pauses, and if I misspoke or stumbled over my words, I’d just repeat myself and edit out the mistake. I got pretty good at editing—because there was no video of my face, I could make cuts that were basically invisible. My livecoding videos each had hundreds of cuts, typically just half a second or so. It would take a 20 minute recording down to a 15 minute final video. It took about 4 minutes of editing per minute of final video.
[1] The video on objectplayground.com isn’t showing up on my phone for some reason. You can find it here instead:
http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/comments/lessons_learne...
I stopped producing videos in April 2018, but the site is still up, and still gets occasional new subscribers. (There's been an influx lately, in fact, and I have no idea why. Maybe because I have a new book out.) It's still netting more than $500/month, although not by a lot. But it requires nearly zero effort from me, so I'm happy with it.
Edit: To clarify, it wasn't a side project when I was producing the videos. But now it's passive income.