This seems like a pretty decent tutorial. I had to struggle through making my own custom standalone follower going back and forth other tutorials myself. lol
One thing to note that I discovered: don't put your custom follower in the custom race "Face Preset" list. It will tick the "Is CharGen Preset" box, which will fudge up the "facegendata" pathing and disable the ability to export "facegendata" all together. It wasn't fun wondering why my custom hair and face geometry wasn't being used and why the follower folders weren't being created. 
Also, when you set your follower's skin tone to a custom color, be sure to match it for your follower by going to Actors > Actor > Character Gen Parts tab > Face Tinting Color. If you don't you might end up seeing a neck seam from the discoloration between the body and face. Then again, it might be different since I never selected a "Skin" trait for my follower.
As for the custom race, if you want to have your follower work with various body types, you can opt to leave out creating the body parts "Armor Addons" (torso, hands, and feet) as default. I'm still looking for more people to test out my follower using other body types, but so far my follower is working for both UNP and CBBE body types doing this.
One last thing, in the "General Data" tab of your custom race, be sure to go to the "Copied Data" section and select "Default Race" (or any others that you see fits) for "Armor Race" so that your follower will properly show the equipped armor. There was a case where I didn't do this and my follower ended up being permanently naked no matter what armor she had on. lol
Ever thought about making a helpful guide to archiving all of those loose files into a .bsa file? The CK can technically create the archive for you automatically but I think it may leave out the "facegendata" stuff for some reason. I ended up having to use a utility like BSA-Opt to create the archive manually. In the end, it helped compress the mod from being 16MB to about 3MB and simplifies it to needing just 2 files for the mod to work. I think it would be good practice for future follower mod makers to get in the habit to do so on release. 
Edited by KunoMochi, 25 August 2015 - 08:33 PM.