The YouTube Loophole Printing $1M+ for SaaS Startups Right Now

Join me as I chat with Cody Schneider about the power of using YouTube Creators for influencer marketing. Cody explains a step-by-step playbook for acquiring customers through YouTube creator partnerships. The strategy involves reaching out to 100+ creators in your niche, offering a three-video package plus affiliate commission, identifying which creators drive the most conversions, then putting top performers on monthly retainers. This creates a scalable system where you eventually have dozens of creators regularly making content about your product, with trackable ROI through affiliate links. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:03 - Why partner with Youtube Creators 04:38 - How to find and contact YouTube creators 08:11 - Crafting the email and follow-up strategy 09:26 - Overview of the Strategy 14:42 - The value of underpriced attention 19:12 - The numbers and scaling the process 22:06 - Biggest Bottleneck 22:50 - Automating the process 24:47 - Why start now Key Points: • YouTube creators + affiliate marketing is an effective strategy for getting initial customers, especially for SMB products with one killer feature • The strategy works by reaching out to creators, having them make videos about your product, and giving them affiliate commissions • This is a marketing arbitrage opportunity because many smaller creators (10k-50k subscribers) don't know how to properly price themselves • The goal is to identify underpriced creators, test them, then put the best performers on retainer to create monthly content The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ Boringmarketing - Vibe Marketing for Companies: boringmarketing.com The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn: thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.skool.com/startupempire/about FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND CODY ON SOCIAL Cody’s startup: https://www.graphed.com X/Twitter: https://x.com/codyschneiderxx Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@codyschneiderx

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  There are founders making millions of dollars a year buying ads with creators on YouTube. And there's a certain strategy and way to do it. So I brought on a friend of mine, Cody Schneider, to actually walk through all of this. This is a tutorial that might feel a little boring, but if you stay to the end, you'll know how to actually make money with creators. And creators is how people find products nowadays. So this is a really, really big deal. And I'm so grateful for Cody for taking the time and actually showing us, screen sharing the entire way through how to do this step by step.

• 0:48Greg Isenberg?

  All right, I got a vibe coded app with no customers, Cody, and I need some help.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  I love it, man. This is, okay, so this playbook is super good for this, especially when it's like an SMB type of product that you're trying to sell, or like a tool that has like one killer feature. YouTube creators plus affiliate marketing is like one of the best ways to go about getting your first customers. And the reason for that is it's basically a product demo that's in disguise, right? So when you break it down, like what's, what's happening is somebody, you're basically like reaching out to creators and you are getting them to create videos about your product. And then you're giving them an affiliate commission. So you basically pay them for the video and you're giving them an affiliate commission based off of the traffic that they drive. And I'll break down why you do that, like why we see this work. And we'll go into detail about the whole playbook.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  And like, I'm going to write out the actual emails that you should send, what tools you should use for the reach out, et cetera. But that's the kind of the high level. And the reason that this is a massive opportunity is that it's an inefficient market. And what I mean by that is that if you say, for example, if you go to like one of these like creator aggregators, right, or like a creator network, or you hire an agency, the creators understand their real value. But if I go and I reach out to enough YouTube creators, they don't know how to price themselves, right? Like we'll see this all the time, especially with smaller creators that are like 10,000 to 50,000 subs. They don't know what their value is. And so if I reach out to 100, say I get 50 to respond.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  And then of those 50, 10 are going to underprice themselves so dramatically that like they're basically a marketing arbitrage, right? I work with them and then I can go and find the winners of those 10 of that cohort. And I put them on retainer. And again, we'll walk through this whole thing. I'm going to show you step by step. And that's kind of the high level of like, how you get this to work, why this works. And then the last thing I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll say before we jump into this is that it's, you can track the ROI on this. Unlike when you're doing like short form creator marketing, right? Like using Tik Tok or Instagram reels or YouTube shorts. With that, the user sees the video, they go and search it on Google. And then like, it's hard to track the direct ROI of the activity.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  In contrast with this YouTube, like longer form YouTube video, say it's a 10 minute video. You give them an affiliate link. They click that in the YouTube description and you can see the exact dollar amount that somebody is providing to your company. Like what is the value that they're actually providing with the media that they're making? So yeah, questions before I jump into it or?

• 3:19Greg Isenberg?

  The only question I have is because I don't want people to listen to that and click out because they're like, no, this is, this is small boy stuff. How much, can, can you make serious money by this strategy?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  I have a friend that took his company from zero to six million ARR in 18 months, only running the strategy entirely bootstrapped. The company is called Everbee. Um, I, it's my friend Cody McGuffey is an absolute G. Um, if you're trying to like really quickly now they're moving into basically like e-commerce in, in total, like a, like an e-commerce shop. So if you're trying to build out an e-commerce shop, it's like quickly and easily is possible. Like that is, is company is basically doing that. But this is the exact playbook, the exact strategy that I've seen people execute. This is not some like small thing, right? Like imagine Greg, like you have a hundred creators that are posting a video, a video about you monthly, about your product, right? What happens if you do that within a category?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Like you're going to be everywhere overnight, right? That is, that is the game.

• 4:20Greg Isenberg?

  It's like, what are people doing with these clipping agencies, right?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 4:24Greg Isenberg?

  Are you clipping short form? Why are you spending thousands of dollars clipping short form? When you could be doing this, it's unbelievable. Cody, let's, let's give the people what they want. Let's get into the sauce. Let's dispense the sauce.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  I love it. I love it. Let's go in. All right, cool. So first part of the process is actually getting these emails. So let's just break down how you actually go about this process, go about doing this. So I'm going to go and let's do like Looker Studio, right? So which is this, um, uh, basically a tool for like data visualization. So there's tons of people that are basically making tutorials about how to do Looker Studio. So say you're a, um, uh, like a data visualization or you build like some tool. Actually, Google Ads might be a better one, right? So say you're, you're doing like a, uh, uh, like you sell some type of software to people that run Google Ads. Right?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  So there's hundreds of these creators that are making videos about Google Ads. Like if I go and I filter by four to 20 minute videos, and then this month, we're going to see all of these creators that make Google, like videos about Google Ads. So this creates a perfect opportunity for me to reach out to all of them and be like, hey, I want to sponsor your video, have you talk about X product, right? So we can go into this and what people don't know is you can actually see the emails of these creators. Okay, so I go to their company or sorry, I go to their YouTube profile. I click view email and I can actually see their contact email.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  So imagine I go, I find all these, I scrape all of their, their, um, their YouTube, uh, uh, channels. And then I can go individually and get all of the emails of all these creators. Okay. So the challenge with this is it's behind a captcha and YouTube limits you to only about like eight email, uh, like opens per, uh, per time that you do this, right? Or per session. It's like a 24 hour rolling window is how it works. So there's a couple of ways to get around this. One, you can go hire somebody off of Fiverr. Um, if you just go like I paid a guy like a hundred and $25 to scrape with 10,000 emails for me in a category. That's one way to do it.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Um, another one that you can go do is use, there's this endpoint from Rapid API. Um, that is YouTube.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Email scraper. Yeah, YouTube channel email scraper. Uh, you pay the subscription, you can do calls to the API. He basically has like a, don't quote me on this, but this is the only way that this would be able to function. But um, you can pay these offshore captcha validation. So it's a real human that's like Cliff King captcha.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  So that if this is the robot's ass, they like cue it in like India. That's honestly brutal, bro. It's crazy, man. It's crazy. But anyways, um, see there's like these, these, it's really like, it's actually an API that you can call. It's actually insane. Um, like we, we in a different life use this at a, at a point. So is that how I'm, yeah, assuming this works. Um, but yeah, so uh, basically uh, this allows for you to go and do API calls for the individual YouTube channels. You get all those emails back. So uh, those are two different ways. You can do this manually too. Like you don't even have to like do it any like technically. What I just showed you, you can do, you can do eight a day. So in a week, whatever that translates into, right? Like you can do uh, in the range of we'll say like 50 a week, right?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  That's more than enough to in a two week period, you reach out to all of them. You've contacted a hundred people. So you contact those hundred people and the email that you send is stupid simple. We have tested everything. This is the best one that we always see perform. So the subject line ends up being paid collaboration.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Um, super, super dumb. Uh, we just all lowercase, right? And then it's like, hey, or I was just like, hey, uh, um, love the content. Uh, you're posting on LinkedIn. I'm sorry, posting on YouTube. Can I get a cost breakdown for a three video package? And I'll give you an affiliate commission of 30%. So I just used a super whisper uh, to basically do that transcription. I always get asked like what we're using for that. Um, and so let's break down why we're doing this. Like, why are we all doing a video package of three and also giving them an affiliate commission? So there's strategy behind this. And then what I'm going to do is basically send like.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  10 follow-up emails because these creators are constantly getting blasted. So you just like literally have to follow up with them so much. It's ridiculous. It's like actually a pain in the ass, but it, it, it, it, it, this is like what we do and it works. So, but to take a step back, so why the three video package? So the three video package, why we're asking for that is we've seen better results than just doing one video. When it's one video, it's like a flash in the pan to their audience. In contrast, when I do that three videos and they do like different like angles, it gets their audience to be like, oh, like this person actually like uses this tool, right? Um, and so that's like one component. You spread that out over like a six to eight week period. So it's not like they're doing like three videos, you know, week after week.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  It's like, you know, kind of mixed in with our other content. Um, and then the other piece is the commissions, the affiliate commissions. Why do we give them the affiliate commission? One, we want to be able to track the ROI they're producing for us. And then two, it creates this lock-in with the creator so that long-term, they won't increase their prices on you because they're like, oh shit, I'm making 10 grand a month in affiliate commissions from this company. Like that creator, if they're good, they're naturally going to grow. And as they start to work with new brands, they're going to increase their prices, right? And for you, they like, it just creates like this relationship lock-in so that those prices don't increase. It just creates an uncomfortable conversation for them, which is great. And then the other component is as brands like will approach them for exclusivity.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Hey, I don't want you to work with this other competitor. Um, I want you to only work with us. It also has this where it's like, if they, if they change from working with you, again, creates this awkward situation for them where it's like, oh, I'm getting paid out 10 grand. I don't want to like hurt that relationship with this person that I built over, you know, whatever it is, the last 12 months. So that's the email that you send, send just like 10 follow-ups, basically like asking them again, over and over in different ways for this pricing and this package. Um, the other component of this is the actual like strategy behind why we're reaching out to like 100 creators simultaneously. Okay. So if I reach out to 100 people, and actually let's do this in a Google sheet, just to like, show like fake data.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  So it's like, we'll say like, you know, uh, channel one, uh, channel two. Uh, channel three, et cetera. Um, and then we'll say like their cost. And so imagine that I reach out to all of these channels. And they come back to me and we'll say, uh, you know, we'll say subscribers. So like 22,000 subscribers, 10,000 subscribers, you know, uh, uh, and then, uh, well, you know, 30,000 subscribers, just to give numbers. And imagine I have, you know, a hundred of these, right? So they're going to come back with their cost for a three video package. Say they say something like 1600. They say something like, uh, you know, 2000.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  And then they say something like, uh, we'll say, uh, you know, 3000. I can start to identify who is underpricing themselves in the market. And so because this is an inefficient market and people don't know what the value of the services that they're about to provide you. What you're going to naturally find when you reach out to enough people is that there's a subset of people that are basically underpricing their, uh, like what they're doing. So again, just to like put numbers on this, what I would do is basically take the cost of the three video package, um, divided by the, uh, the amounts of, um, of, uh, of, uh, like subscribers that they have. You could also do like average views per video. That's like another way to do this.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Well, typically we do like a composite of both, but just for the sake of simplicity, we'll just, we'll just do like the subscribers on the channel. And then we can start to see basically like how much we're paying for the like to get in front of their audience, right? And from that I can then start to rank stack. Who is the cheapest? So of the hundred people I contact, here's the 10 cheapest, relatively cheapest, based on what they're saying their, their like value is. And again, when they come back with a number, you can negotiate down. Like I guarantee it, I would cut that in half. Like work your way up from there or just come to them like a lot of the times they'll just say something like, uh, like, what can you afford? What can you pay? Cause they just

• 13:36Speaker 01

  don't even know like what the price themselves. They're, they're, they, and I just come in and be like, hey, creators of your size, we typically pay them X amount per video. Um, is that interesting to you? They'll come back and say, no, they'll say a higher price. And then, you know, it just turns into negotiation. So.

• 13:51Greg Isenberg?

  And what about like CPMs? I haven't heard the word CPM.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think about it like CPMs that much. I'm way more focused on like, is this creator making content already within the category? Cause that means that they understand the audience and like having some, you know, marginal success in that space. Cause they understand how to talk to this audience. And if I get a thousand views, but it's like an extremely engaged audience that's listening to what this person's saying. Like if they suggest this tool or show this tool to like accomplish the outcome that they're looking for, like we're going to see extremely high conversion rates. This is basically like a video sales letter or like a product demo or webinar that's happening like asynchronously, like at scale with multiple people, you know, simultaneously.

• 14:36Greg Isenberg?

  That lives forever.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  That lives forever. That's evergreen.

• 14:40Greg Isenberg?

  It's insane. It's insane. One, one quick little tip is don't look so much. I mean, you could look at views like directionally, but the likes and comments really show people's propensity to or love for a particular creator. By the way, like, like this video if you haven't already liked it. Uh, and comment, you know, like for the algorithm and comment for our souls. Thank you. But yeah, I think if you look at the likes and comments, you'll, you'll get a better sense as to how valuable thing, uh, how valuable someone is. And I want to say one more, one more thing. You use the words, I think mispriced attention and.

• 15:22Greg Isenberg?

  I want to take a step back and just explain why that is such an important term. Some of the biggest businesses of the planet were built on top of mispriced attention. Like, when you think of how many multi-billion dollar businesses were built on top of five

• 15:39Speaker 01

  I can give you an example that's really finite, right? So, wish.com, which doesn't really exist anymore. Wish.com became a billion dollar company in like 18 months with Facebook ads in their early days. And the reason is you could get like one cent link clicks on Facebook ads and there was nobody else running ads to like cheap shit that was being basically imported from China.

• 15:59Greg Isenberg?

  Zynga too.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Exact same strategy, exact same strategy. And so, that's the scale. This isn't like, again, this small boy thing, right? Like, this is some small boy thing. If you find attention that is like high quality, that's relatively cheap, it is one of the most powerful growth levers that you can pull as a marketer.

• 16:22Greg Isenberg?

  So. Yeah, I just wanted to highlight that, that this is like, this is, this is huge.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think that it's like, again, when you think about the best like tactical growth people, this is what they're doing, is they're trying to find misaligned things that don't make sense and then exploit it as aggressively as they can. And by the time you're hearing about it, I'm just gonna bluntly say this so that everybody's listening, by the time you're hearing about it, it's already cooked. Like, that channel has probably already been exploited. Um, I'm not saying that this one is, it depends on the niche that you're in for this, like this strategy, this specific creator strategy. Um, but like, do not buy a course, do not like go and like pay somebody for this. They're just reselling their like used clothes, basically, right?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Like, that is what's happening. They're saying it's new and it's not, right? So, anyway, but this can be really effective, though, if your product's in like a specific niche, a specific category, that there aren't a lot of people already doing this. Um, if you're in like the dropshipping category as an example. It is gonna be so expensive, man. Like, this is not gonna work. There's so many people like going after that. But if you're in some like niche, tiny thing, that's super, uh, like, you know, random, I don't know what that would be. Um, you know, off the top of my head, but like, maybe it's like a deep pop resellers, right? Or something like that. There's a massive opportunity to go after, uh, those types of markets with this strategy. So.

• 17:54Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I think, uh, where it's probably cooked is like the most highly competitive spaces.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:01Greg Isenberg?

  But, uh, you know, if you're, if you're not in the most competitive space, that's insane, then, you know, yeah, there's probably some room there. And, and the truth is, even in the most competitive space, there is opportunity. It's just harder to find, right? There's always.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  You just have to message more people, like, right?

• 18:21Greg Isenberg?

  Well, it's like real estate, right?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:23Greg Isenberg?

  Literally like real estate, like, you know, there's, there's, in real estate, even if, you know, in two, in 2008, for example, when everything was sky high, you know, there was still opportunity in 2008. Um, there's still opportunity.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  You just have to be able to find it and like have that process to identify it. And I think that, again, to talk through this, like, this, the strategy here, if you contact enough people, you're gonna find people that are underpricing themselves. But it just comes down to like, how do I contact a thousand people? How do I contact 10,000 people, right? You're going to find people that like, are saying, yeah, I'll do it for $200 a video. Hell yeah, I'll do it for $200 a video. And in reality, they should be charging you a grand, but they just don't know that like their value is actually that thing. And that is what you're looking for is inefficient markets, inefficient distribution markets where people are underpricing their value. So, okay, so you found these people, you've now reached out to them, you've got that three video package in lock,

• 19:19Speaker 01

  and, uh, you're doing the affiliate commission. So you give them that affiliate URL, that's gonna be able, uh, with that, you're gonna be able to track the actual ROI of the person that you like worked with. So imagine I reached out to 100 people and I ended up working with 10 of them. And of those 10, what you'll find is two to three will actually be like 80% of the revenue that's driven from all those people that you worked with. So at the end of this cohort, you basically look at your affiliate commissions and for the affiliates, sorry, I didn't mention this already, you can use something like Rewardful. I think that's kind of like one of the best priced ones. Like if you're just like a vibe-coded tool, there's tons of these out there, though,

• 20:02Speaker 01

  all of them kind of function in the same way. But anyway, so you have identified your like two to three best performers. At that point, you go back to the creator and you're like, hey, creator, I want to work with you long-term. Can I get a video per month and we'll pay you basically on a retainer to make that video? They're gonna 100% say yes, because they all want recurring money to come from this. And now you have, we'll say, two people that are doing a video per month. You restart that cycle now. So I go contact 100 more people. I find the 10 that are underpricing themselves. I work with those 10. I find the two winners. I add them to my retainer, right? So now I have four people. And then you just keep scaling this up. So what

• 20:47Speaker 01

  this translates into over time is you go from I have nobody posting about the product on a monthly basis to I have 100 people that are on retainer that I know every time they post is ROI positive, and I have it directly trackable to them. And 100 videos drop about my product on YouTube within my niche, within my category on a monthly cadence. So that's happening, right? You're basically creating this like astroturf of content, right? You're astroturfing this content to like make it like, like take over this ecosystem. The knock-on effect that comes from this is that every once in a while, one of these videos will go viral, and you're gonna get 10 other creators to make a video about the video that you paid to get made by the creators

• 21:29Speaker 01

  that you have on your retainers. So it creates this spider web effect, right? Where it's like, oh, I'm paying these people, but then because their videos are going viral, talking about the product, all of these other people. Now are willing, basically, and it's not even willing. They're just doing it because they're going to get views and they're going to sign up for your affiliate program as well. Cause they're like, oh, they did this and like they're driving to an affiliate. I can also get paid doing this as well. And so this is how you scale up this whole like process. And it's really effective again for these types of tools that are these like they have a specific pain point that they're solving. It's one killer feature, et cetera. So, but yeah, that's the whole playbook.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  The, the, the challenge with this is the actual like relationship with these people as time goes on. If you have a hundred people you're working with, it's like, it gets hard really quickly to go and basically like validate they're actually doing the work that they're saying they're doing. Like the video is actually dropping, et cetera. But the, a lot of the times like what people will do is build basically like when a video drops, they have a form submission. That form then goes into like a make automation to track. And then they'll like build a spreadsheet that's basically pulling in the views from those videos. So that they can see like the volume and then actually like graph that out of like cures the actual impact that's happening in the background, you know, while this is running. So.

• 22:50Greg Isenberg?

  And from a reach out perspective, like are you, are you automating any of that cold reach out?

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. Yeah. Like I would go and I would use like rapid API to scrape. We drop them into, you know, instantly to send the cold email. Like you can set up instantly's bots. There's actually this company I just learned about called Stormy AI. So gangster, the founder, I know him, his name's Robert. He's just killing it. He's like the classic, like just, you know, cracked founder that's building something super interesting. So what this does is it allows for you to search for people in like a category. So you could say like, you know, we'll look for like Claude code, you know, as an example. And I want people, you know, smaller creators, right?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Basically, what this does is it goes and it searches for individuals that have made videos already about these products, right? And it finds them, it finds their email addresses. And the crazier thing that it does is it will actually negotiate the pricing with them. So it basically is an AI agent that does like the research, the reach out, and then also the negotiation to like come to a deal. Once you've arrived at that deal, it will then go and basically like, you know, circle in the human that's like, yes, right? So it basically just found all these creators. I can go and like draft an email. The email is happening within the application, right?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And then the like, that whole process that we kind of described, it's almost handling a lot of that heavy lifting for you. So if you're just like, you know, a one man band and trying to figure out how to do this, this is like a way that you that you can do this. So go sign up for it. They're like early stage company. They're actively building out new features to like make this more and more automated. So it's super, super powerful tool.

• 24:42Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. All right, thanks, thanks, Cody. This is, this is really cool. I mean, I, I assume people know this, but they, most people actually don't. I think a lot of people are like, yeah, creators, I should be doing something with creators. But it's probably so competitive or it's too hard. And they don't realize that now is the time to actually make this happen before it gets fully cooked. We're at like medium rare right now.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Totally. I think the other thing with this too is that like the, like people think that, like people think that create, like this is how people discover products now, actually. Like, I don't like, people don't, they passively discover things, right? Rather than like actively discovering them is a lot of what we're seeing. And so you have to like, this is what for you pages have changed about the entire, like entirety of the internet is basically you have to find this like middle ground equilibrium between like it gets the distribution on that channel. So that it can get passively discovered, right? But it's also like, like, you know, providing enough entertainment, enough value so that it gets the reach, right?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  And this is why I always like, try to, you know, tell people like, don't hire somebody for this. Find somebody that's already doing this and work with them. Cause they've already figured out like the algorithm for that specific category. It is so much harder to train somebody to like, understand an algorithm or how, you know, the YouTube algorithm functions rather than finding somebody that's already having success. And then just giving them, you know, the resources to basically like include your product within that. So don't like, do not start from ground zero, right? Like, that is the worst way to go about doing this.

• 26:25Greg Isenberg?

  Absolutely. Well, Cody, thanks for spilling the sauce. We appreciate you. I'll include links where to find Cody to follow his journey, his company's journey, graphed.com. And that'll all be in the show notes and dude, I'll see you next time.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Thank you, G. I'm stoked to come back and talk more about this type of stuff, so.

• 26:46Greg Isenberg?

  All right.