My new startup helps you find YouTube creators to partner with

It's been a while since I posted here, so I wanted to share some exciting updates about the product I've been working on recently. It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of YouTube. I no longer use most traditional social media (recently LinkedIn sucked me in a little bit), but the one place I probably never leave is YouTube. I watch a lot of it, and I'm a creator on the platform as well.

For a long time, I wanted to do something related to the platform, and it took me a lot of brainstorming, a few failed attempts, and a bit of luck stumbling upon an old friend turned co-founder to finally start something in the space.

Let me introduce you to Influesque, the YouTube marketing platform. We aim to build the best tool for businesses that want to explore creators as part of their marketing strategy. Right now, our database of creators is already very comprehensive (though it's almost exclusively English-speaking), and we use some magic to deliver a lot of metrics that help you find a perfect fit.

There are many metrics already live: historical creator performance, calculated metrics like engagement rate and average views, insights into creators' audiences, details about their niches and topics, and much more. But what we're most proud of is our sponsorship detection mechanism. We've already analysed more than 20 million videos and collected a huge database of companies that partner with creators. This way, companies can find their competitors and tap into this amazing market.

We also have a fancy-smart search that lets people use plain language to describe their queries instead of clicking around filters. But of course, clicking around is also allowed.

There are many more features on our roadmap as we explore the specific types of problems we can solve for this market. We've started adding simple Trello-style campaign management, creator management with shortlists, and things like that, but more to come!

I'll be honest. My true mission for this product is to help more YouTube creators build a sustainable income doing what they love. But to do that, we need more brands willing to work not only with huge names but with mid-size and small creators as well. That's why we started by building it specifically for brands. There are definitely a lot of exciting ideas for expanding the product for creators too. Stay tuned!

If you've read something here that could be interesting to you, your company, or someone you know, just drop me an email and we can take it from there. We have a free trial as well, so you can simply sign up and try the product yourself. I'd really appreciate any feedback, as it's the most important driving force for us right now.

The best way to follow the product is by signing up (we send not-annoying monthly updates) or following us on LinkedIn (either me, my co-founder, or the product page itself).

In other news, I'm slowly crawling back onto YouTube with new videos, and there are a lot of personal updates (I moved to Amsterdam!) coming there too.

Cheers, and have a fantastic weekend!