A year ago, me and my business partner hopped on a call that kicked off everything we’re doing now.
We’d been working at an agency together, doing YouTube content for creators. Good experience, learned a lot. But we kept having the same conversation: we could do this better on our own.
So we partnered up. Four days in, we got on a call with a creator we’d both been working with through the agency.
Before he even joined, we had one rule between us: listen more than we talk.
We opened with a simple question. Where’s your head at going into the new month?
He told us straight up. He was basically just using the agency for editing at that point. The scripts weren’t cutting it. The ideas were coming from him anyway. He was paying for a full service but only using half of it.
That’s when we laid it out. We’ve partnered up. We want to become part of your team. Not just edit your videos. The full production, ideation, scripting, thumbnails, strategy, the second channel, all of it.
He told us he almost left the agency the day I did. Almost sent the message that day. The only reason he stayed was because my partner was still there servicing him.
He was already looking for a way out. We just showed up at the right time with the right plan.
On that same call, we mapped out the whole play. Main channel, second channel, short-form across platforms, a thumbnail system where we research and test three to six concepts before even starting. And we started talking about building out a high-ticket offer for his audience, a course launch, even a 21-day challenge he had coming up that would generate leads for everything.
He grilled us too. How are you going to make money? How does this scale? Real questions. And we were honest. We didn’t have it all figured out. We told him we were focused on getting results first and building from there.
That honesty is what sealed it.
That call turned into a year-long partnership. We went from four videos a month to eight. Built out weekly syncs, scripting sessions, ideation pipelines. He even handed us a corporate client from that same conversation.
If you’re trying to land your first real partnership, here’s what actually worked for us: don’t lead with what you can do. Lead with what you already know about them. Show up having done the work before the call even starts. And be honest about what you haven’t figured out yet.
That call was a year ago. We’re still on it every single week.
If you want the actual frameworks, breakdowns, how we structure channels to scale like this, I’m putting all of that in my newsletter. Link’s below and it’s free. Go sign up, that’s where I’m dropping the stuff I don’t put anywhere else. See you there.