About two years ago, I walked away from my job as CMO at an edtech startup to launch a YouTube agency with my co-founder Calum. Last year, we scaled to a very healthy six figures. In this video, I ask the question: if we were to start over knowing what we know now, how would we do it? And what would we do differently?
To help me answer that, I've got a playbook. Eight diagrams that walk you through from step one all the way through to step eight: how to launch a profitable YouTube agency. By the end, you'll have a complete roadmap for how to launch your own.
Framework 1: How to Choose Your Customer Type
The first framework is the positioning quadrant, and it's designed to help you decide which kind of customer to go after.
As a YouTube agency, you have four potential customer types: corporate, startup, creator, and freelancer. Each one has very different problems and very different needs.
A creator probably has a production setup and some expertise already. They might need help in one section of their process, maybe strategy or editing or channel management. A startup, on the other hand, probably has no expertise in-house and is looking to outsource the entire channel to an agency.
The way of working together is different too. Creators tend to be agile and flexible but change strategy at short notice, making it hard to develop a long-term partnership. Startups typically determine strategy once a year, so you can lock in your service for an entire year, which makes the agency more stable.
That's why we went for startups. Partly because of the network we had before we launched, partly because of our expertise in embedding YouTube into the broader marketing mix, but primarily because we knew startups would give us a steady, predictable revenue flow and therefore a stable business.
The quadrant has two axes. On one axis: systems. Corporates and startups work more systematically and can commit for longer. On the other: ownership. With startups and freelancers, you tend to have ownership from research and strategy all the way through production, editing, and distribution. With creators and corporates, they want more control over more steps.
Startups sit in the sweet spot: lots of ownership, but you can still operate systematically by embedding within their team.
Framework 2: The Business Model
This framework addresses how to construct your business model to meet your customer's needs.
Our customer type is the startup, and their two biggest problems are that they don't have an in-house film team and they don't have the channel expertise to launch and scale a YouTube channel. So our business model needs to meet those needs.
That means offering a full-stack YouTube experience: research and strategy, scripting, production, post-production, distribution, and analytics, feeding that analytics process back into the research and strategy. We go in and launch the channel with full ownership from day one, which gives us significant influence over whether the channel is successful.
The model is built around two principles, which I call A and I.
A is for accountability (ownership). The more ownership you have over the process, the more influence you have over results, regardless of whether you're focusing on creators, startups, freelancers, or corporates.
I is for integration. Integration in data means having access to everything you need: not just YouTube Analytics but Google Analytics, customer data, everything that feeds into YouTube ideation. Integration in communication means being on their Slack, learning what's happening in the company quickly, and communicating what's going well and not so well back to them. This is important emotionally too, because you develop a relationship with the in-house team much more naturally than through email.
Take ownership as much as possible, and integrate as deeply as possible. Those are the two predictors of a successful, long-lasting partnership.
Framework 3: Validate with Multipliers
You want to make sure your business model has potential to make money before you invest heavily. For me, this involves two steps, and this is the first.
Multipliers are people with a high degree of seniority and a high degree of connectedness. Investors, board members, people at private equity or VC funds, serial founders. People who are plugged into many different companies.
Why are they so effective? Two reasons. First, they have experience across many companies, so they can tell you whether your model has demand. They can tell you whether there are five companies in their portfolio that would already need to hire you. Second, when it comes to client acquisition, these people have leverage over decision makers within companies.
Practically, this means mining your network for multipliers, inviting them for coffee, talking through your model, and gauging demand. If you don't have multipliers in your network, you only need one or two. Send a few cold messages, jump on a call, and get that feedback.
Framework 4: Build Your Marketing Assets
Step two in validation is creating marketing assets: the website, the lead magnet, and the proposal. These map to top, middle, and bottom of funnel.
The website is where people find out about your services. The lead magnet is where they contact you for a free strategy session or similar. The proposal is a one-pager outlining exactly the service you'd offer a specific client.
The effect is to formalise the business in your client's eyes. They're investing a decent amount of money in you, so you need to look professional and credible.
This might sound obvious, but there are many freelancers in our network with aspirations of building an agency who haven't done this foundational work. When you talk to them about their business, it's still vague. If they haven't got it fixed down in their own minds, there's no way the client will understand what they offer. Do this foundational work and from one day to the next you'll go from a nebulous idea to something that genuinely resembles a business.
Framework 5: Client Acquisition
Step one in acquisition: go straight back to your multipliers. These are the people who helped you validate your business. Now you go back with your marketing assets and say you're ready to start working with clients.
There's a wonderful accountability loop here: if an investor recommends you to a CEO in their portfolio, the CEO feels obliged to at least inquire about your services. That's one of the reasons we got off to a flying start with Humble&Brag. And multipliers keep providing, because they continue to work with new companies. If you do a good job for one company in the portfolio, you'll likely be recommended across the entire portfolio.
But you can't rely solely on multipliers. You also need a parallel strategy, and for us, everything we needed was on LinkedIn. Three things, in order of priority.
Launch post. Anything announcing a new company gets a lot of reach and positivity. Some freelancers in our network got up to 100 job offers through their launch post. Be strategic about it, and follow up with everyone who expresses interest within 24 hours.
Commenting. Watch for posts where people are explicitly asking for help with video production. Be quick to start a conversation. We got two or three jobs in the first few months purely by commenting.
Connecting. Write down your dream clients, get in contact with a few free resources or a quick assessment of their current channel and what you could improve.
With multipliers and these three LinkedIn strategies, you'll likely have warm leads from day one.
Framework 6: Continuous Improvement
What's more important than the makeup of the team is building in processes to constantly improve the service you offer.
All effective improvement models, whether it's the double diamond, the lean startup's build-measure-learn, or something simpler, are processes of acting and reflecting. Creating something, then having the time to run a retro to identify what's not working and change it, and identify what is working and continue it.
We did this with clients through monthly retros (a simple stop-and-start format), and internally between Calum, me, and our editors. If you have this process of constant improvement, improving by 1 per cent each week, pretty quickly you'll have a service that's very hard to compete with for anyone starting from scratch.
Framework 7: Building IP
This is something that happens naturally if you've done the previous steps: building out marketing assets, systems, and processes for continuous improvement. That documentation is typically unique and hopefully clear enough for others to follow.
That documentation is valuable because it defines how you do things and ensures great service. But it becomes even more valuable when you turn it inside out and start offering it as a service or product to people outside the company.
This is the design for a successful modern agency. We saw AJ&Smart, where Calum used to work, doing this about a decade ago: offering design services to clients, then productising those services into educational programmes. They had income from clients and income from selling educational products. The B2C product gave them marketing and brand awareness. The B2B product gave their B2C product credibility.
The lifecycle of the modern agency: you start with services, over time you standardise them into productised services, you build out processes and IP, you develop that into educational products, and then, with the advent of AI and tools like VI coding, you can develop simple digital products that anyone in your space can use.
Framework 8: The Marketing Engine
What does the marketing engine look like for an agency like ours? Four channels: YouTube, LinkedIn, the blog, and webinars. All feeding into a lead database through free trainings, strategy workshops, digital products, or a newsletter.
These should be sequenced. Start with YouTube, because if you start with YouTube, you develop a wealth of scripts in your tone of voice that contain data, anecdotes, and stories truly unique to you and your company. Once you have that, you can develop unique blog posts with AI assistance that maintain your tone of voice and contain unique information. With those two channels building a constant flow of viewers and visitors, you can then harness that through LinkedIn and webinars, which are your activation channels for triggering purchase or conversion actions.
At Humble&Brag, we've made a start with the blog and the YouTube channel. Numbers are still relatively small, but we're already getting our first clients through both channels. Blog impressions went over 10,000 for the first time recently, and ever since we started focusing on it in February, there's been a significant increase in impressions with clicks starting to follow. YouTube shows a constant flow of traffic that keeps growing as long as we keep making videos.
With those four channels, that's all you need to run both the agency side and the programme and product side of your business.
The Three Horizons
There's one more exercise we run with clients at the beginning of every collaboration: the three horizons. You sit with leadership and ask, for the short term (up to 6 months), the midterm (up to a year), and the long term (up to 3 years): what are our priorities? And perhaps more revealing: what does good look like? What would we be happy with and satisfied with if we had achieved those goals?
Write it all down. Make sure it's aligned. And when you've got it, you have goals relatively well defined for each period. It ensures a common direction from day one.
If you want to find out more about how we operate as an agency, or if you're building a YouTube channel for your business and want professional support, book a call with us.
