Hello! Sayu here again. You would be surprised at the amount of people who show up to me who have no idea what to get for their first vtuber model. From a standpoint of an artist who's worked on a handful of models - and a lot of them abandoned without ever receiving rigs -, here are a few things worth considering for an aspiring vtuber to be successful and to have a correct branding.
This is the only specific case I think starting as a corporate vtuber might be an advantage over indie. They understand that self knowledge is difficult, so they will try to understand yourself in your behalf. All corporate vtubers have a model that correctly matches their attitude and personality, both in art style, age and concept. Even when you don't get to decide anything about your vtuber persona, as a corporate vtuber, you have others think about that for you, so you can focus on the content creation aspects.
With that being said, here are a few things worth considering:
Start with your natural voice
Make a recording of your voice or get in a discord call with friends. Ask them: If I were a vtuber, what would I look like? It's good to start with your voice, since your character's face would better reflect your shape and personality. What age and anime face would they have, and what would their favorite things be? Try to think of already existing characters or illustrations that would fit your voice.
If you can make different voice impressions and you would like to explore them with vtubing, it would be nice if you could ask your friends to help you out with a profile as well.
Make sure your vtuber persona is YOU.
Who is your favorite anime character and why? What kind of things would you like talking about on stream? Are you more into the adult aspect of vtuber content creation, or would you rather just make meme content? How do you want to be perceived by your audience? These are very crucial questions you have to ask yourself, and taking the wrong art direction during these steps can lead you to frustration down the road. Making yourself a loli model implies innocence and cuteness. In that case, it's hard to create adult content, just because of the way you are perceived by your audience. While making a more mature character with makeup can imply that you have a more serious, mature persona.
There's something that's very important to take into account: you are the denial of 99% of things, and the acceptance of very few things. So if you're having a hard time finding out who you are, ask yourself the question: "what am I not?"
Remember, vtubing is a means of content creation. It means you can be either a streamer, a youtuber or a singer. And for content creation, you don't need a vtuber model to start it. You can start out with a facecam, a pngtuber or simply with nothing at all. You can decide if you want to show up or not.
There might be better content out there about finding yourself as a content creator, but the best way to find out who you are is to create content is to start doing it today, creating as many different things as possible and see what sticks.
Steal from AI "artists"
AI is a dangerous tool indeed, because it's in the hands of big techs and millionaires whose only religion is more money, but they have produced a few individuals who think are smart, and that's ai prompters. It's important to know that all AI work is not copyrightable, therefore cannot be commercialized, even when some prompters make thousands of adoptable characters for adoptions hoping for a dime.
If you think making a prompt for AI is a skill, think for a second: you can ask chatgpt to do it.
If you are looking for a design that might go well with your character, feel free to look up AI character designs on deviantart and pinterest. You'll see a lot of people selling them, but don't pay attention to that (lol). You can use them and modify them as you please, and you can ask an artist to use them as a base to move forward from.
Make sure you want to go down this road
I see a lot of vtubers quit because they don't like the community, but ask yourself: are these people you call vtubers really streamers? Are they really making content? So many people deemed as vtubers are pre-debut vtubers who only stream once in a full moon, and spend their whole days on twitter just farming likes by harassing strangers. In that case, just stray your path away from that negativity and focus on who actually inspires you. What vtuber you know has nurtured the community you would like to have? What would you like to build and make different? I really question the youtube videos talking about the vtuber community. Aren't these people vtubing for themselves? I understand that backstabbing and the lack of collaboration can be a thing, but why do you have to collaborate with other established creators? Why not have your loyal chat mods unboard your stream as your collaborators?
A lot of people want to be vtubers just to be streamers. I would advise getting into video making first, then jumping into streaming. Streaming can be an insalubrious job, with little to no financial return, especially without correct advisement. It can mean several hours of dedication setting up bots, creating overlays and sound alerts just to have 0 to 5 total viewers in a full day.
It's always good to remember you don't need a vtuber model in order to be accepted in a community. Things can turn out different than you expect when you start doing things, and it might be better that way.
These are the hints I can give you about it! You can always make your own models, but if you need a flexible artist who will take care of your vtuber vision, take all your references and navigate you through these steps, please consider having me onboard your project! Whether is it just your model, a friend, or a wave of models for an agency, or just a pngtuber. I offer work with a partnered rigger! Check out my samples and prices here!
