The Startup Ideas Podcast - The YouTube Loophole Printing $1M+ for SaaS Startups Right Now

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

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

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.

All right. I got a vibe coded app with no customers, Cody. And I need some help. I love it, man. This is, okay. So this playbook is super good for this, especially when it's like an S&B 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 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 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.

And then of those 50, 10 are going to underpriced themselves so dramatically that 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 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 TikTok 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. 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?

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 small boy stuff. How much, can you make serious money by this strategy? 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 Everby. It's my friend Cody McGuffy is an absolute G. If you're trying to like really quickly now they're moving into basically like e-commerce in total like an e-commerce shop. So if you're trying to build out in the e-commerce shop as quickly and easily as possible,

like that 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 like small thing, right? Imagine Greg, like you have 100 creators that are posting a video, a video about you monthly, about your product, right? What happens if you do that within a category? Like you're going to be everywhere overnight, right? That is the game.

It's like, what are people doing with these clipping agencies, right? It's crazy. What are you clipping short form? Why are you spending $1,000 clipping short form when you get, be doing this. It's unbelievable. Cody, 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 this. So I'm going to go and let's do like Looker Studio, right? So which is this

basically a tool for like data visualization. So there's time. tons of people that are basically making tutorials about how to do Looker Studio. So say you're a like a data visualization or you build like some tool. Actually, Google Ads might be a better one. Right. So say you're doing like a like 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. 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 products, 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, 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, I scrape all of their their YouTube channels. And then I can go individually and get all of the emails of all these creators. So the challenge with this is it's behind a CAPTCHA and YouTube limits you to only about like eight email like opens per. 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 ways to get around this. One, you can go hire somebody off of Fiverr. If you just go and pay, like, I paid a guy like $125 to scrape with 10,000 emails for me in a category. That's one way to do it. Another one that you can go do is use, there's this endpoint from Rapid API that is you to, email scraper.

Yeah, YouTube channel email scraper. 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 you can pay these offshore CAPTC validation. So it's a real human that's like Clifking the CAPHA.

So that it passes the robot's ass. They like chew it in like, That's brutal. That's great brutal, bro. It's crazy, man. It's crazy. But anyways, see, there's like these, it's really like, it's actually an API that you can call. It's actually insane. Like, we, in a different life, use this at a point. So it's how I'm, you know, assuming in 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. Like, you don't even. have to like do it any like technically what i just showed you can do you can do a day so in a week

whatever that translates into right like you can do uh in the range it will say like 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 a hundred people so you contact those hundred people and the email that you send is stupid simple we've 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 overcase, right? And then it's like, hey, I just like, hey, love the content.

You're posting on LinkedIn. 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 to basically do that transcription. get asked like what we're using for that. 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 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 this is like what we do and it works.

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. 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.

It's like, you know, kind of mixed in with our other content. 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, hey, 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 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. 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.

So it's like, we'll say like, you know, channel one, channel two, channel three, et cetera. 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, you know, we'll say subscribers. So like 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, 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, you know, 2000.

And then they say something like, we'll say, you know, 3,000. 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, where you're going to nationally find when you reach out to enough people is that there's a subset of people that are basically underpricing their, 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 divided by.

the amounts of, of, like, subscribers that they have. You could also do like average views per video. That's like another way to do this. Well, typically we do like a composite of both, but just for the sake of simplicity, 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 100 people I contact, here's the 10 cheapest, relatively cheapest, based on what they're saying their 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 and work your way up from there. Or just come to them, like a lot of the times, they'll just say something like, like what can you afford? What can you pay? Because they just don't even know, like, what the price themselves.

And I just come in and be like, hey, craters of your size, do 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 and then, you know, it just turns into negotiation. And what about like CPMs? I haven't heard the word CPM.

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? Because that means that they understand the audience and like having some, you know, marginal success in that space. Because 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 a webinar that's happening like asynchronously like at scale with multiple people, you know, simultaneously. That lives forever. That lives forever. That's evergreen. It's insane. It's crazy. 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 this video if you haven't already liked it. 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 someone is. And I want to say one more thing. You use the words, 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. Like when you think of how many multi-billion dollar businesses were built on top of five-cent? 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 the 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. And so it's the exact same strategy. Exact same strategy. And so that's the scale. This isn't like, you know, again, this small boy thing, right? Like this is some small point 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 as a marketer.

Yeah. I just wanted to highlight that that this is like, this is, this is huge. 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 going to 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. I'm not saying that this one is. It depends on the niche that you're in for this strategy, this specific creator strategy. But like, do not buy a course. do not go and like pay somebody for this. They're just reselling their like used clothes basically, right? 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. If you're in like the drop shipping category as an example, it is going to be so expensive, man. Like this is not going to work. There's so many people like going after that. if you're in some like niche tiny thing that's super 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 yeah i think uh where it's probably cooked is like the most highly competitive spaces yep but you 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 the truth is, even in the most competitive space, there is opportunity. It's just harder to find, right? There's always always, you just have to message more people. Right. Right. Like, it's like real estate, right? Yeah, exactly. Literally like real estate. Like, you know, there's, there's in real estate,

even if, you know, in 2008, for example, when everything was sky high, you know, there was still opportunity in 2008. There's still opportunity. 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 strategy here, if you contact enough people, you're going to 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 were 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 grant. 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 and 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 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 like cohort, you basically look at your affiliate commissions. And you for the affiliate, sorry, I didn't mention this already. You can use something like rewardful. I think that's kind of like one of the best price ones. Like if you're just like a, you know, a vibe coded tool. There's tons of these out there, though, all of them kind of function in the same way. So, 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 on a basically on a retainer to make that video? They're going to 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. So now I have four people. And then you 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 track to them and a hundred 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 astro turf of content, right? You're astro-turfing this content to like make it 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 going to 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 the 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. Because 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, so that's the whole playbook. The challenge with this is the actual, like, relationship with these people as time goes on. If you have 100 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 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 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 here's the actual impact that's happening in the background so you know while this is running so and from a reach out perspective like are you are you automating any of that cold reach out and 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 bot.

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 and 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? 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 A.A. 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? 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. Cool. All right. Thanks for. Thanks, Cody. This is this is really cool. I mean, 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. 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 providing enough entertainment enough values so that it gets the reach right and this is why i always like try to you know tell people like don't hire you hire somebody for this, find somebody that's already doing this and work with them. Because they've already figured out 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. 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, graph.com, and that'll all be in the show notes. And

dude, I'll see you next time. Thank you, Gene. It's stoked to come back and talk more about this type of stuff. So all right.