What Vibe Coders Wish They Knew Sooner

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Category: Marketing Strategy

Tags: AffiliateCreatorsMarketingStrategyYouTube

Entities: Cody SchneiderEverbeeRapid APIStormy AIYouTube

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Summary

    Business Fundamentals
    • Collaborating with YouTube creators is a strategic way to market products, especially for SMBs.
    • Affiliate marketing combined with YouTube creators can serve as effective product demos.
    • The market for creator collaboration is inefficient, allowing for strategic cost benefits.
    • Tracking ROI is more straightforward with long-form YouTube content compared to short-form content.
    Marketing and Sales
    • Reaching out to creators directly can uncover underpriced opportunities.
    • A three-video package with affiliate commissions is recommended for better engagement.
    • Follow up persistently with creators to secure collaborations.
    • Mispriced attention can be a powerful growth lever for businesses.
    Automation and Tools
    • Utilize tools like Rapid API and Stormy AI for automating creator outreach and negotiation.
    • Consider using automated processes to manage creator relationships and track video performance.
    Actionable Takeaways
    • Leverage YouTube creators and affiliate marketing for product promotion.
    • Identify and exploit inefficient markets for creator collaborations.
    • Use tools to automate and scale creator outreach efforts.
    • Focus on creators already successful in your niche to maximize impact.
    • Regularly review and optimize your creator partnerships for sustained growth.

    Transcript

    00:00

    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,  

    00:19

    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  

    00:37

    this step by step. All right.

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

    00:53

    I love it, man. This is OK.

    So this playbook is  super good for this, especially when it's an SMB   type of product that you're trying to sell or a  tool that has one killer feature. YouTube creators   plus affiliate marketing is one of the best  ways to go about getting your first customers.  

    01:12

    And the reason for that is it's basically  a product demo that's in disguise. Right.   So when you break it down, what's what's happening  is somebody you're basically 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  

    01:30

    affiliate commission based off of the traffic that  they drive. And I'll break down why you do that,   why we see this work.

    And we'll go into detail  about the whole playbook. And , 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  

    01:48

    is that it's an inefficient market. And what I  mean by that is that if you say, for example,   if you go to one of these creator aggregators,  right, or 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,  

    02:06

    they don't know how to price themselves. Right.  we'll see this all the time, especially with   smaller creators that are 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. And  then of those 50, 10 are going to underprice   themselves so dramatically that they're basically  a marketing arbitrage.

    Right. I work with them and  

    02:27

    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 how you get this to work, why this  works.

    And then the last thing I'll say before we   jump into this is that you can track the ROI on  this, unlike when you're doing short form creator  

    02:48

    marketing, right? using TikTok or Instagram Reels  or YouTube Shorts.

    With that, the user sees the   video, they go and search it on Google, and then  it's hard to track the direct ROI of the activity.   In contrast with this YouTube, longer form  YouTube video, say it's a 10-minute video, you  

    03:05

    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.

    what is the value that they're actually   providing with the media that they're making? So,  yeah, questions before I jump into it?

    The only  

    03:20

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

    I have a friend that   took his company from zero to 6 million ARR in  18 months, only running the strategy. Entirely  

    03:39

    bootstrapped. The company is called Everbee.

    My  friend Cody McGuffey is an absolute G. If you're   trying to really quickly now, they're  moving into basically e-commerce in total,   an e-commerce shop.

    So if you're trying to  build out an e-commerce shop as quickly and  

    03:57

    easily as possible, his company is basically  doing that. But this is the exact playbook,   the exact strategy that I've seen people execute.  This is not some small thing.

    Imagine, Greg, you   have 100 creators that are posting a video about  you monthly, about your product. What happens if  

    04:15

    you do that within a category? You're going to be  everywhere overnight.

    That is the game. What are   people doing with these clipping agencies?  right?

    Why are you clipping short form? Why   are you spending $1,000 clipping short form when  you could be doing this?

    It's unbelievable. Cody,  

    04:31

    let's give the people what they want. Let's get  into the sauce.

    Let's dispense the sauce. 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  

    04:46

    this. So I'm going to go and let's do Looker  Studio, right?

    So which is this basically a   tool for data visualization. So there's tons of  people that are basically making tutorials about   how to do Looker Studio.

    So say you're a a data  visualization or you build some tool. Actually,  

    05:10

    Google Ads might be a better one, right? So say  you're doing a you sell some type of software   to people that run Google ads, right?

    So there's  hundreds of these creators that are making videos   about Google ads. if I go and I filter by four to  20 minute videos, and then this month, we're gonna  

    05:30

    see all of these creators that make videos about  Google ads. So this creates a perfect opportunity   for me to reach out to all of them and be , hey,  I wanna sponsor your video, have you talk about   X products, right?

    So we can go into this. And  what people don't know is you can actually see the  

    05:48

    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.

    So imagine I go, I find all these,  

    06:04

    I scrape all of their YouTube channels and then  I can go individually and get all of the emails   of all these creators. OK, so the challenge with  this is it's behind a capture and YouTube limits  

    06:20

    you to only about eight email opens per per  time that you do this. Right.

    Per session.   It's 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. If you  just go I paid a guy one hundred and twenty five  

    06:38

    dollars to scrape 10 emails for me in a category  That one way to do it Another one that you can   go do is use There's this end point from Rapid  API that is YouTube email scraper. Yeah.

    YouTube  

    06:59

    channel email scraper. You pay the subscription.  You can do calls to the API.

    He basically has a,   don't quote me on this, but this is the only  way that this would be able to function. But   you can pay these offshore CAPTCHA validation.  So it's a real human that's clicking the  

    07:22

    CAPTCHA. But if this is the robot's  ass, they do it in India or Pakistan or   whatever.

    That's honestly brutal, bro. It's crazy,  man.

    It's crazy. But anyways, see, there's these,   it's really , it's actually an API that you can  call.

    It's actually insane. we, in a different  

    07:38

    life, use this at a point. So that's how I'm  assuming this works.

    But yeah, so basically this   allows for you to go and do API calls for the  individual YouTube channels. You get all those   emails back.

    So those are two different ways. You  can do this manually too.

    you don't even have to  

    07:55

    do it any, technically. What I just showed you,  you can do, you can do A to day.

    So in a week,   whatever that translates into, right, you can  do in the range of, we'll say, 50 a week, right?   That's more than enough to in a two-week period,  you reach out to all of them. You've contacted 100   people.

    So you contact those 100 people, and  the email that you send is stupid simple. We  

    08:16

    have tested everything. This is the best one that  we always see perform.

    So the subject line ends   up being paid collaboration. Super, super dumb.  Just all lowercase, right?

    And then it's , hey,  

    08:35

    I love the content 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  

    08:52

    Super Whisper to basically do that transcription.  I always get asked, , what we're using for that.   And so let's break down why we're doing this.  , 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  

    09:08

    I'm going to do is basically send 10 follow up  emails because these creators are constantly   getting blasted. So you just literally have to  follow up with them so much.

    It's ridiculous. It's   actually a pain in the ass.

    But this is what  we do and it works. But to take a step back,  

    09:28

    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 a flash in the pan to their   audience. In contrast, when I do that three  videos and they do different angles, it gets  

    09:43

    their audience to be , oh, this person actually  uses this tool. And so that's one component.

    You   spread that out over a six- to eight-week period.  So it's not they're doing three videos week after   week. It's , you know, kind of mixed in with our  other content.

    And then the other piece is the  

    10:02

    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 , oh,   shit, I'm making 10 grand a month in affiliate  commissions from this company.

    that creator,  

    10:21

    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 you just creates 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 will approach them for exclusivity. Hey,  

    10:41

    I don't want you to work with this other  competitor. I want you to only work with   us.

    It also has this where it's if they if they  change from working with you again, creates this   awkward situation for them where it's , oh, I'm  getting paid out. 10 grand.

    I don't want to hurt   that relationship with this person that I built  over whatever it is the last 12 months. So that's  

    11:00

    the email that you send. Send just 10 follow-ups  basically, asking them again over and over in   different ways for this pricing and this package.  The other component of this is the actual strategy   behind why we're reaching out to 100 creators  simultaneously.

    So if I reach out to 100 people,  

    11:21

    and actually let's do this in a Google Sheets just  to show fake data. So it's we'll say , you know,   channel one, channel two, channel three, etc.  And then we'll say their cost.

    And so imagine  

    11:40

    that I reach out to all of these channels  and they come back to me and we'll say,   you know, we'll say subscribers. So 22,000  subscribers, 10,000 subscribers, you know,   and then, you know, 30,000 subscribers just  to give numbers.

    And imagine I have, you know,  

    11:58

    100 of these. Right.

    So they're going to come  back with their costs for a three video package.   Say they say something sixteen hundred. They  say something , you know, two thousand.

    And   then they say something we'll say, you know,  three thousand. I can start to identify who  

    12:17

    is underpricing themselves in the market. And  so because this is an inefficient market and   people don't know what the value of the service  is 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 what they're  doing.

    So, again, just to put numbers on this,  

    12:38

    what I would do is basically take the cost of the  three video package divided by the the amounts of   of of subscribers that they have. You can also  do average views per video.

    That's another way  

    12:54

    to do this. Well, typically we do a composite  of both, but just for the sake of simplicity,   we'll just we'll just do the subscribers on the  channel.

    And then we can start to see basically   how much we're paying for the to get in front  of their audience. Right.

    And from that, I can  

    13:11

    then start to rank stack who is the cheapest.  So of the hundred people I contact here the 10   cheapest relatively cheapest based on what they  saying their their value is And again when they   come back with a number you can negotiate down  I guarantee it I would cut that in half and work  

    13:29

    your way up from there or just come to them. A  lot of the times they'll just say something , what   can you afford?

    What can you pay? Because they  just don't even know what the price themselves.   And I just come in and be , hey, creators of  your size, we typically pay them X amount per   video.

    Is that interesting to you? They'll come  back and say no, they'll say a higher price,  

    13:49

    and then it just turns into negotiation. And what  about CPMs?

    I haven't heard the word CPM. Yeah, I   don't think about it CPMs that much.

    I'm way more  focused on is this creator making content already   within the category? Because that means that they  understand the audience and having some marginal  

    14:08

    success in that space. Because they understand how  to talk to this audience.

    And if I get a thousand   views, but it's an extremely engaged audience  that's listening to what this person is saying,   if they suggest this tool or show this tool to  accomplish the outcome that they're looking for,  

    14:24

    we're going to see extremely high conversion  rates. This is basically a video sales letter   or a product demo or a webinar that's happening  asynchronously, at scale with multiple people,   you know, simultaneously.

    That lives forever. That  lives forever.

    That's ever been. It's insane.

    One  

    14:43

    quick little tip is don't look so much. I mean,  you could look at views directionally, but the   likes and comments really show people's propensity  to or love for a particular creator.

    By the way,  

    14:58

    this video if you haven't already liked it. And  comment, you know, for the algorithm and comment   for our souls.

    Thank you. But yeah, I think if  you look at the likes and comments, you'll get   a better sense as to how valuable someone is.

    And  I want to say one more thing. You used the words,  

    15:18

    I think, mispriced attention. And 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. when you think of how many  multi-billion dollar businesses were built on  

    15:38

    top of five, 10. 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 18 months with Facebook ads in   the early days.

    And the reason is you could get  one cent link clicks on Facebook ads and there  

    15:54

    was nobody else running ads to cheap shit that  was being basically imported from China. And so-   Zing had two.

    Zing had the same strategy. Exact  same strategy.

    And so that's the scale. This isn't   this small boy thing, right?

    this is some small  boy thing. If you find attention that is high  

    16:14

    quality, that's relatively cheap. It is one of the  most powerful growth levers that you can pull as a   marketer.

    So, yeah, I just want to highlight that,  that this is this is this is huge. Absolutely.   And I think that it's , again, when you think  about the best, tactical growth people, this  

    16:36

    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 going   to bluntly say this so that everybody's listening.  By the time you're hearing about it, it's already  

    16:51

    cooked. , that channel has probably already  been exploited.

    I'm not saying that this one is.   It depends on the niche that you're in for this,  , this strategy, this specific creator strategy.   But, , do not buy a course. Do not, , go and,  , pay somebody for this.

    They're just reselling  

    17:11

    their, , used clothes, basically, right? , 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 a specific   niche, a specific category that there aren't a  lot of people already doing this.

    If you're in  

    17:28

    the dropshipping category, as an example, it is  going to be so expensive, man. this is not going   to work.

    There's so many people going after that.  But if you're in some niche, tiny thing that's   super , you know, random, I don't know what that  would be, you know, off the top of my head. But  

    17:46

    maybe it's a depop resellers, right, or something  that. There's a massive opportunity to go after   those types of markets with this strategy.

    So,  yeah, I think where it's probably cooked is the   most highly competitive spaces. Yep.

    But if you're  not in the most competitive space, that's insane,  

    18:08

    then yeah, there's probably some room there. And  the truth is, even in the most competitive space,   there is opportunity.

    It's just harder to find,  right? You just have to message more people.

    Well,   it's real estate, right? Yeah, exactly.

    Literally  real estate. , you know, there's there's in  

    18:27

    real estate, even if, you know, in 2008, for  example, and everything was sky high, you know,   there was still opportunity in 2008. There's  still opportunity to be able to find it and have   that process to identify it.

    And I think that,  again, to talk through this, this strategy here,  

    18:44

    if you contact enough people, you're going to find  people that are underpricing themselves. But it   just comes down to , how do I contact a thousand  people?

    How do I contact 10,000 people? Right.

    You   are going to find people that 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  

    19:02

    that 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 and  

    19:20

    you're doing the affiliate commission. So you give  them that affiliate URL.

    That's going to be able   with that. You're going to be able to track  the actual ROI of the person that you worked   with.

    So imagine I reached out to 100 people and I  ended up working with 10 of them. And of those 10,  

    19:36

    what you'll find is two to three will actually  be 80 percent 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 you for the affiliate.  Sorry, I didn't mention this already.

    You can use  

    19:54

    something reward full. I think that's kind of one  of the best price ones.

    if you just a you know   a five coded tool there tons of these out there  though All of them kind of function in the same   way So but anyway so you have identified your two  to three best performers At that point you go back  

    20:12

    to the creator and you're , Hey creator, we want  to, I want to work with you long-term. Can I get a   video per month and we'll pay you on a, basically  on a retainer to make that video.

    They're going   to a hundred percent say yes, because they all  want recurring money to come from this. And now  

    20:29

    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  

    20:46

    just keep scaling this up. So what 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 a hundred videos  

    21:04

    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  astroturf of content, right, you're astroturfing   this content to make it take over this ecosystem.  The knock-on effect that comes from this is that  

    21:21

    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 that you have on your   retainers. So it creates this spiderweb effect,  right, where it's , oh, I'm paying these people,   but then because their videos are going viral  talking about the product, all of these other  

    21:40

    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.   Because they're , oh, they did this, and 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 process. And it's really effective, again,  

    21:59

    for these types of tools that are these they have  a specific pain point that they're solving. It's   one killer feature, et cetera.

    So, yeah, that's  the whole playbook. The challenge with this is the   actual relationship with these people as time goes  on.

    If you have 100 people you're working with,  

    22:18

    it's it gets hard really quickly to go and  basically validate they're actually doing the   work that they're saying they're doing, the video  is actually dropping, et cetera. But a lot of the   times what people will do is build basically when  a video drops, they have a form submission.

    That  

    22:35

    form then goes into a make automation to track and  then they'll build a spreadsheet that's basically   pulling in the views from those videos so that  they can see the volume and then actually graph   that out. of , here's the actual impact that's  happening in the background, you know, while this   is running.

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

    22:57

    for sure. Yeah.

    , I would go and I would use  Rapid API to scrape. We drop them into, you know,   instantly to send the cold email.

    , 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 of, his name is Robert. He's  

    23:17

    just killing it. He's the classic, just, you  know, cracks founder that's building something   super interesting.

    So what this does is it allows  for you to search for people in a category. So   you could say , you know, we'll look for Claude  Code, you know, as an example.

    And I want people,  

    23:34

    you know, smaller creators, right? 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  

    23:55

    with them. So it basically is an AI agent that  does, , the research, the reach out, and then   also the negotiation to, , come to a deal.

    Once  you've arrived at that deal, it will then go   and basically , you know, circle in the human.  That's , yes. Right.

    So basically just found all  

    24:12

    these creators. I can go and draft an email.

    The  email is happening within the application. Right.   And then the 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  , you know, a one man band and trying to figure  

    24:29

    out how to do this, this is a way that that you  can do this. So go sign up for it.

    They're early   stage company. They're actively building out new  features to make this more and more automated.

    So   it's super, super powerful tool. Cool.

    All  right. Thanks, Cody.

    This is really cool.  

    24:46

    I mean, I assume people know this, but most  people actually don't. I think a lot of people   are , 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  

    25:05

    gets fully cooked. We're at medium rare right now.  Totally.

    I think the other thing with this too,   is that the, people think that, , people think  that create, , this is how people discover   products now, actually. , I don't people,  people don't, they passively discover things,  

    25:26

    right. Rather than actively discovering them  is a lot of what we're seeing.

    And so you have   to , this is what for you pages have changed about  the entire, entirety of the internet is basically,   you have to find this middle ground equilibrium  between it gets the distribution on that channel  

    25:42

    so that it can get passively discovered. Right.  But it's also Pat, you know, providing enough   entertainment, enough values that it gets the  reach.

    Right. And this is why I always try to,   you know, tell people don't hire somebody for  this.

    Find somebody that's already doing this and  

    25:58

    work with them because they've already figured out  the algorithm for that specific category. It is so   much harder to train somebody to understand an  algorithm or how the YouTube algorithm functions   rather than finding somebody that's already having  success and then just giving them the resources  

    26:16

    to basically include your product within that.  So do not start from ground zero. That is the   worst way to go about doing this.

    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,  

    26:34

    graph.com. And that'll all be in the show notes.  And dude, I'll see you next time.

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

    All right.