This Claude Code Workflow Finds Viral YouTube Niches in Minutes

All right. So, I used Claude Code to find a bunch of trending YouTube channels using a very simple workflow. And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how you can do the same thing to be able to use AI to identify new and trending niches all over YouTube or even tweak things a bit for other social media platforms instead of waiting for a faceless content creators to do the search and then reveal these channels one at a time. What if you could actively create a system, a workflow that shows you exactly which new channels are blowing up in minutes? No need to spend hours or even days scrolling through your feed for that new niche you've been waiting to start. And you most definitely don't need to spend a fortune on any overpriced tool hoping that it might find you one new niche. With Claude AI's Claude Code feature, you can actually take the driving seat, create a simple workflow that will go on YouTube, look for trending niches, and then compile them for you. This means you can start before everyone else jumps in, before it becomes too competitive or saturated. And if you don't know how to actually create that same style of content, once you found that trending niche, check out my previous video on that topic where I go over the entire workflow that helps creators like us replicate faceless style content with ease. Now, I've tried my best to simplify the process as much as possible. So, no need to worry about not having any technical experience or even programming experience. The process doesn't require a single line of code. Claude Code will handle all the heavy lifting for us. All we're going to do is give it a few simple commands and the AI will do the rest. So, if you're ready to level up your content creation game, let's get started. Now, obviously, we are going to need Claude Code. So, make sure you have an account already set up. Claude Code is only available for paid users, either you are on the Pro or Max subscription. Free users can still use Claude, but they can't access the Claude Code feature, but the entire workflow might give you some ideas. So, try following this process. Once you have your Claude account set up, what you need to do is download a few apps. The first one is obviously VS Code, which stands for Visual Studio Code. For that, you need to go to Google and search for VS Code. Then download the version for your operating system. In this case, mine shows Windows because that's the operating system I'm using. So, make sure yours is downloaded and proceed with the installation. Accept the licenses, go to next, then hit finish, and it should be done. Once VS Code is fully installed, you need to install Python if you haven't already. Make sure you're downloading from the official source. Python is a programming language that's been used for a long time now. So, the first links you usually get when you search for it are typically the genuine versions from the original source. Make sure that's also installed and then move on to the next tool, which is Git. These are all from well-known, trusted sources, so you can just click and download. The final thing you're going to need to install is Node.js. You can grab that from their official site. But once all of these tools have successfully been installed, open VS Code on your computer and install the Claude Code extension if you don't have it. Simply go to extensions from the sidebar and search for Claude Code. The one you need is the one from Anthropic. Select it and then install. In this case, mine is already installed, so there are disable and uninstall options. Now, you'll notice the Claude Code logo here and here as well. You'll be required to sign in once you click the icon. Make sure that's done and then close any open windows. Now, you need to create a folder that you're going to work in. The folder can be created anywhere on your computer. Then either drag and drop it inside VS Code or select open folder here. Create or select your folder and it'll be added to your project. I'm simply creating this folder called YouTube Niche Finder. What happens is it's going to ask you whether you trust this folder. Check the box and select yes. The folder is now open and everything about our project will be saved in there. Now, here's the fun part. It's time to use Claude Code, either from the terminal or by hitting the icon and starting a new session. I like to use the terminal, so click this particular panel to toggle it and the terminal should show up along with a few other options. Another way is to press control plus the backtick key. The backtick is the key right before the number one on your keyboard. Now, to start running Claude Code, all you need to do is type Claude and then hit enter. It's asking if Claude Code should have read, edit, and execute file permission. You can use the arrow keys to move between yes and no. So, just hit yes. As you can see, Claude is logged in now with this splash screen here showing the model and other details. Before we create the app, we need an API key. Since we're going to be accessing YouTube directly to grab some information, we need the YouTube Data API. What you want to do is go to this URL, console.google.com. Once you're there, you need to create a new project. Go to the project selector at the top and you should see all of your projects. There's usually a default project, but in this case, you want to create a new one. I'm going to name mine AI Trends Niche Finder. Leave the organization blank and then click create. As you can see, it says the project has been created. Select that particular project and now you're inside it. If you look at the top, you can see that's the project selected. Now, scroll down to where it says favorite products, look for API and services, and then go to library. Inside the library, search for YouTube Data API V3. Select that one, click on it, and then click enable. Now, you've enabled the API. The status says it's enabled and it's a public API, but you need credentials. Go to create credentials to call the API. Don't worry, we only need to do this once. You'll be given an option between user data and public data. What you want is public data. Make sure the YouTube Data API V3 is still selected along with public data. Then click next. It'll give you the API key. Copy it and then click done. Once you've copied the key, go back to VS Code and type this command. I'm going to leave every command I use inside a prompt document so you can copy them easily. As usual, I'll add the document to my Discord and school communities. Links to both communities are in the video description. Paste the API key that you copied, add a space, close it like this with another space behind, and finally add a .env at the end. One thing you need to keep in mind is how you format this on different operating systems. If you're on Windows, this is the exact format you need to use. But for Mac or Linux users, make sure to add quotes around it like this. That's the only difference. Since this is Windows, I'll just leave it without the quotes. Hit enter and Claude Code is going to ask whether you want to make this edit to the .env file. Select yes or allow all edits during this session. The second option ensures that Claude Code doesn't ask for permission again anytime it wants to make changes to that particular file. Now, if you look inside the project folder, you'll notice that it's created the .env file. This file contains our API key, as you can see. So, Claude Code created the file and then added the key. The next step is to add this command. In case you want to paste something while you're inside the terminal, just right-click and whatever you've copied will be pasted. You don't need to worry about what this command does. All you need to know is that it's going to install some Python dependencies that the software needs in order to use Google's API Python client. It may ask you to confirm the installation. Just hit yes or yes to all each time an option like that pops up. As you can see, it says all packages have been installed, so you can move on to the next step, which is where you'll give it the main command. If you go to the Google Doc file, you'll notice it has a few commands listed. The first one is the .env API key file, the one we already did. Below that is the install Python dependencies command. That's the one we just did as well. And finally, there's the script build command. Copy everything in the script build section and then go back to VS Code. When you paste it, you'll see it says something like pasted text 165 lines. Don't be confused if you see something like this. It's just a way for the terminal to not look cluttered with a lot of text. So, it just shows something simple like this instead to keep things neat. Once you hit enter, it'll show the full text that you copied. As you can see from here, Claude Code will start building the main project file as well as the requirements. Everything you're going to need for the project. Like I said, you don't need to write a single line of code. The AI will do everything for you. If you look at the file explorer, it's added some new files. There's nichefinder.py, there's requirements.txt as well. You can check out the code if you want to, but honestly, it's better to leave that to Claude Code if you have no programming experience. If you look here, you'll notice it's focusing on a bunch of categories. There's finance, there's tech/AI, and these are all YouTube's basic categories, which the AI will be focusing on. Let's go back to the Google Doc and copy this last verification command. Paste it inside VS Code and simply hit enter. The AI is going to run the application as well as fix any issues that come up while it's attempting to run it. What happens is that the AI will use YouTube's API to grab some channels that fit the criteria that was specified in the command. First is that the channel needs to be under a year old. Second, channel subscribers should be between 20,000 and 400,000. Then finally, the channel shouldn't have more than 150 videos posted. That's too much for a solo creator in 1 year. So, any channel with more videos probably has a team helping with production, which we want to skip at this point. If you don't like this criteria and want to make changes, feel free to modify it inside the command. It's just a bunch of instructions written in human language, so don't feel intimidated by it. Don't forget to select yes or don't ask again anytime it asks for permission. Once the process is complete, you'll notice there's a new Excel file here as well as some other files. Every single channel that the AI found during the search process will be added inside this file. However, one thing you need to know is that the YouTube API we're using has daily limits of about 10,000 free tokens. This limits the amount of calls that Claude Code can make in a day. You can extend it by upgrading to a higher token limit, but my recommendation is that you stick with the free version as it works just fine. It gives you about 100 new niches that fit the criteria. And since the tokens reset every day, you simply need to run this last command in the Google Doc to update the list. Let's check out the kind of niches that it's given us. Now, in order to view the file, you can open the folder on your computer. But if you want to view the Excel file inside VS Code, you need an extension. Go to extensions and search for Excel Viewer. Make sure it's installed and you should be able to open the Excel file inside VS Code. As you can see, the AI has created a list of channels that fit the criteria. The number of subscribers arranged in descending order from the highest to the lowest. The age of the channel, for example, this one is about 3 months old and a link to the channel as well. So, you can click it to view the channel directly. This is actually an interesting channel called Home Magic. It was created this January and it has over 400 million views, which is amazing. So, you can check this out. There's Casual Finance, which is trending right now. It started last year and they have over 6 million views and it's not only looking at long-form content, it's looking at short-form as well. There's Time for Growth from the psychology niche. It was also created June of last year. Alicia Invest, which is killing it in the finance niche right now. You get a bunch of really popular niches. There's Yoga Kids. I actually created a tutorial covering the kids yoga niche. So, feel free to check it out if you're interested. Instead of going through the trouble of scrolling your feed for trending niches, this workflow pulls a bunch of them for you daily. And since you can run it every day, the file keeps getting updated every single time. So, you can use this process to find a bunch of these niches and obviously, the file is saved inside your project folder. You can also open it directly in Excel instead of inside VS Code. Once your tokens reset the next day, all you need to do is run python_finder.py and it will update the document for you. Just make sure Excel isn't running the list outside VS Code, otherwise the script won't be able to write to it. In case you're running the app and it asks you for options like expand the date window, relax the age filter or add more keywords, simply type yes, add new keywords and it will add more keywords so it can increase its search range and find you even more trending channels. If you look at the document now, you'll notice it's added additional entries. Previously, we had 96 and now it's added more additional ones that fit the same criteria. There's Warren Buffett Playbook, there's Sleeping Philosophy, there's Fitness Tips Girl and a bunch more. And just like that, you've built a simple system that can help you find new trending niches daily. Anyway, if you found this video helpful, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe buttons. Thank you and see you in the next one.