About
I built ReplyDial because I could not keep up with my own comments
I am Rahul Wagh. I have run a DevOps and cloud channel on YouTube since 2020, next to a full-time engineering job. It took nearly seven years to reach 100,000 subscribers. Somewhere on the way, answering comments went from the best part of my evening to a backlog I was ashamed of.
ReplyDial is the tool I needed. I use it on my own channel every week.
My channel, as it looks today. Tutorials on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Terraform, Kubernetes and AI tooling.
- 104,000
- subscribers on the channel
- 368
- videos, the first in 2020
- 7.6M
- views, most from search on old videos
- ≈200
- comments a week that deserve a reply
- 15,292
- learners on Udemy, 2,100 reviews
Where I teach
YouTube
Free tutorials since 2020: full courses on AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, Ansible and Google Cloud, and lately AI tooling for engineers. 368 videos, 104,000 subscribers.
Udemy
Structured, hands-on courses for people who want the whole path in one place. 15,292 learners and 2,100 reviews across two courses. Students ask questions there too, which is one more inbox I answer myself.
- AWS Networking Zero to Hero: MasterclassBestseller★ 4.4732 ratings12.5 hours · 132 lectures
- Azure Zero to Hero: Master Microsoft Cloud from Scratch★ 4.51,372 ratings9 hours · 95 lectures · Beginner
The problems I had, in plain words
None of this is market research. It is what happened on my channel, one year after another.
Problem 1
Comments grow with the old videos, not the new ones
A tutorial from 2023 still gets views every day, and every day somebody asks a question under it. With a few hundred videos, the questions never stop coming, even in a week where I upload nothing.
Problem 2
The arithmetic does not work
A proper answer to a technical question takes me about 3 minutes. 200 comments a week is 10 hours. I have a full-time job and a family. So I answered the newest ones, felt guilty about the rest, and let them sink.
Problem 3
YouTube Studio shows a list, not a to-do list
Studio can filter to comments I have not replied to. But it is one endless scroll with no count, and it never remembers what I already looked at. The timestamp comment I skipped last week is there again this week, between the real questions.
Problem 4
Every reply starts from a blank box
Studio's suggested replies say thanks. They do not answer "why does my Terraform plan show a change every run?". For a technical channel the answer is the whole job, and I was typing each one from zero.
Problem 5
Silence has a cost I could not see
Unanswered questions are lost viewers, lost video ideas and, for anyone who sells a course, lost customers. When I finally counted, old videos that still get traffic had questions sitting unanswered for years.
Problem 6
The tools that promised to fix it scared me
Auto-reply bots post under your name without you reading it. That is exactly what YouTube's spam rules are written about, and viewers can tell within a week. I wanted help with the work, not a robot wearing my face.
What I am building, and why
In the first years I answered every comment within hours. Someone in another country writing “this got me through my interview” is a strange and wonderful thing to read at 11pm. That is why I started making videos, and I did not want to lose it when the channel grew.
So I built the thing I was missing: one inbox with every comment on the channel that has no reply from me, newest first. A draft answer next to each one, written for that comment and that video, in my voice. I read it, fix it, and press Post. Comments I decide not to answer stay dismissed. That is all ReplyDial is.
Today I get through about 200 comments a week in under three hours, mostly from my phone. When I ran our own free checker on my channel this month, it showed 0 unanswered out of the 151 newest comments. I had not seen that number in years.
My vision is simple. Every viewer who takes the time to write deserves an answer from a real person, and no creator should need a team to give it. The software should do the finding and the first draft. The creator should do the deciding.
The longer story: nearly seven years on YouTube with a full-time job, how I answer 200 comments a week and what ignoring comments cost me.
Who it is for
Creators with a job
You make videos in the evenings. You do not have ten hours a week for comments, but you care about the people who write them.
Teachers and tutorial channels
Your comments are questions with real answers. A good reply keeps a learner going, and the repeated question is your next video.
Creators who sell something
A course, coaching, a community. "How do I join?" under a video from last year is a customer waiting for an answer.
Small teams
One person answers for the channel and needs to see everything that is waiting, in one place, without stepping on anyone.
What it will never do
I put my own channel through this tool. These are the rules I would not use it without.
Nothing posts without your click
No auto-reply, no scheduling, no bulk sending. It is a product decision, not a setting, and it will not change.
Your words, exactly
A draft is a starting point. What you approve is what is posted: nothing added, nothing shortened, no "sent via".
Paced like a person
Replies go out with pauses, with a cap per day and per video, because that is how a real creator answers.
Only what is needed
Comments are read live from YouTube and not stored. Disconnecting revokes access and deletes your data.
Who runs ReplyDial
- Built by: Rahul Wagh, founder and developer.
- Operated by: Priyanka Wagh, Sweden. Made in Sweden.
- YouTube access: verified by Google; uses the official YouTube Data API.
- Payments: handled by Paddle, our merchant of record.
- Open source: the read-only tools are on GitHub.
- Contact: contact@replydial.com. I read it myself.
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