What is the best offer to pitch a YouTuber these days?
The best offer to pitch a YouTuber is probably ideation. I say that as somebody who has struggled with ideation. Everything on YouTube now starts with the packaging — the title and the thumbnail. That's just how the game works. People typically come up with titles and thumbnails before they even come up with the video. If you have some trending story that helps, but often evergreen channels will try to find the most insane moment or concept or idea to use in a thumbnail and then build their whole video stack around that. Sounds crazy, but it's true. So if you can help solve the bottleneck of ideation for somebody, they are typically able and willing to pay you a lot of money. I'm solving the bottleneck of ideation for myself and I've basically seen everything in my media business get alleviated as a result. The reality is people usually have more production capacity than they have ideas. So if you go all the way up the funnel and solve the very first step in the big pipeline, you'll usually do far better. I would sell them some sort of ideation system.
I’m hitting the upper limits of what one person can realistically handle with my current level of systematization. I keep seeing situations where a better way would exist, but I don’t have time to figure it out, so I push through at a less effective level. I ran into the same issue with my agency—I know there must be more leveraged ways to do the same work without hiring another team member. Pragmatically, I’m at about $2 million a year in profit, which feels like a reasonable ceiling for someone trying to juggle an agency model (which is less profitable per unit time), a main YouTube channel, and other content‑production mechanisms. Even with good time management, that seems to be the upper limit for one person. To give you a behind‑the‑scenes look: I usually start with the video idea, then the title and thumbnail, because those drive performance. I source ideas from YouTube comments using a comment scraper, turn them into titles via templates, then think about a thumbnail (though I don’t over‑think it—content matters more). I’ll sometimes leave a silly clip at the end, but I focus mainly on production. Logistically, I get the ideas into the pipeline, then filming is straightforward: I turn on the camera and talk for an hour or two, sometimes following a strict outline, other times just using my tablet and pen because it’s more time‑efficient.
Yeah, I like to think so as well. I deliver a ridiculous amount of value—whether it’s $60, $70, or whatever the current price is, sometimes around $3,000 depending on when you watch this. To make a long story short, I don’t actually recommend posting on YouTube for a while; most people see creators like me posting and assume that’s how you make money, so they feel they need to post and showcase their systems. I can only do that because I’ve already had success selling this through cold outreach and built a business model aside from YouTube. Only once I had the cash flow to justify spending time on YouTube did I start making videos consistently. Before you start making videos about a money‑making topic, get to the point where you’ve achieved more than 99% of people at that thing. If you’re a standout 1% with some accomplishment or social proof, people will be far more likely to listen to you. There are literally a million‑plus people waving light poles online talking about stuff they don’t really understand. When you can demonstrate real results—say, making $42,000 a month—and show how you did it, you cut through that noise much more easily. The key is to do it without bragging; come across as genuine, not ungrounded. Based on our interactions in Maker School, you’re not that kind of guy—you’re good. For me, it’s more about reputation than follower count; I care about the strength and quality of each follower, not just the number. I’m not missing out on money by focusing on goodwill; in fact, I’m accumulating more goodwill than pretty much anyone in the industry by doing this. Thanks for the advice—you totally get how to play the game.
Well, I wouldn't be in your situation in the first place. It doesn't make sense to start a YouTube channel or talk about stuff until you've actually delivered value in the past. If your revenue is less than $20,000 a month, you shouldn't be running this channel right now because lead volume will be too variable and there's nothing to build a business around. Spending time just touching up your content and trying to make it really high quality completely defeats the purpose—believe it or not, your content doesn't have to be very high quality as long as you're somebody worth listening to. For example, I'm just in my room in a tank top after a shower; I might not know what I'm talking about when I started this video, but it's still worth listening to because I've achieved outcomes that a lot of people here want to achieve, and I've consolidated a lot of knowledge. The two are valuable together, but the actual quality of the content aside from that knowledge and the perceived value of being associated with me isn't anywhere near as high. So the hack is: you need to do good first. Don't start a content business and then run another business side by side. Start the other business, crush it, achieve massive success, and then make videos talking about it. If you do anything else, you're really just putting the carpet before the horse and wasting your time.
I already had a couple of ideas. I'm going to create docs new and turn reduction community exclusives. The first thing I want to do is create a straight line path to optimize video outreach: cover camera, microphone, video content, what to talk about, how to annotate, other assets to give people, maybe an example script. I've already covered this stuff in other videos and my channel; I'm organizing it for high perceived value because many people struggle with it. I'll go through comments on the daily updates channel to find big sticking points and add them to my thing, then decide what my videos will be about. I'll scroll through comments to source ideas. Leonardo commented on my stuff; he runs AI Foundry, has 19K subs, his videos go viral; he does banger one-offs, kudos to him.