Last updated on June 23rd, 2025
If you’re a startup on YouTube, you probably want to act a little differently than a regular YouTube creator.
Because the YouTube funnel for startups is fundamentally different from how it is for creators, isn’t it? You have different goals and a completely different approach to earning money, don’t you?
And while we’re talking about startups and creators here, this info is helpful for almost anyone growing a business on YouTube.
VidAction | Podcast | LinkedIn | YouTube | Newsletter
So to understand the YouTube funnel for startups, we’re going to talk about these key factors. One, defining your YouTube goals.
Two, choosing your strategy. Three problems tracking your sales or conversions. And four, how are people actually finding you?
So YouTube Ads for startups versus the creator approach. Number one, define your YouTube goals. If you are growing your startup or small business with YouTube, you are probably talking with your team about something called the “Sales Marketing Funnel.” And for the moment, let’s define that funnel as the steps you hope or expect your best potential customer will follow as they go from not knowing anything about you, to becoming a loyal customer and telling everyone how awesome you are.
That would be great. Right? So I want to share with you the difference between the YouTube funnel for startups versus the funnel for creators. And I’ve actually created my own model for this. I call it the “YouTube Flywheel.” It actually goes around in a circle, sort of, so it’s technically not a funnel at all, but a wheel of concentric circles where the closer you get to the center, the closer you get to revenue.
And this flywheel operates differently depending on whether you want to act like a startup, meaning you’re driving sales or signups or leads or like a creator when you want to go for views or subscribers or sponsorships, etc. Now, these are very different goals, aren’t they?
If you’re a startup, whether it’s a SaaS or a FinTech, or a B2B, B2C, or an AI platform, you need signups, leads, conversions.
And probably the reason you’re on YouTube is you’re trying to drive a higher Annual Recurring Revenue, also called an ARR.
But if you’re a creator, maybe you’re a tech reviewer, a beauty influencer, a gamer, or there’s many other kinds, of course, you’re basically looking at the beginning to drive subscribers, views, and something called audience retention, which is how long people watch the video. And if you’re doing this well, you’re going to get ad revenue, sponsorships and potentially down the road, sales of your own, whether it’s products or services.
So if you’re a creator, you by definition create content and you eventually create a product which is served by that content. But as a startup, you already have a product and you’re trying to build content or other traffic inputs to serve that product, right? So it’s flipped a bit.
So startups, they’re looking for “runway.” And creators, they want to “go full time.” The timeline is different for creators and startups too. Creators want to go full time, which is upgrading from the “side hustle,” and if everything goes right, this could happen within, let’s say, 18 months to three years.
But startups on the other hand, depending on how they’re funded, they may only have 18 months to three years before they run out of cash. Or, it’s also known as running out of runway. About 90% of startups are out of business or in zombie mode within three years. And this is true whether you’re venture funded or bootstrapped. And probably the rate of creators who make it to full-time within three years is less than 10% as well.
But the financial goals are pretty different for each of these, right? Going full time as a creator, let’s call that $60,000 to $100,000 per year. And creator YouTubers are usually focused on the individual, so that’s for one person. Meanwhile, startup YouTube goals are focused on a product or service like SaaS or FinTech or an AI product, and often need to be bringing in millions of dollars in revenue during that same time period that the creator’s trying to go full time.
So it’s the same time, it’s just different goals. Now, usually the creator starts with, how much? Zero dollars, right? Often, startups can start with some investment, or maybe it’s backed by the founders themselves.
Now, many of the tools and visuals that creators and startups are going to use on YouTube can look very similar. There’s an enormous amount of crossover. We might even say that creators, they should look more like startups, and startups should often more work like creators. And you may have your own perspective on how this should be or how it is, let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Now defining this is frankly always evolving for me, but this is how I see it today.
Oh, and by the way, if we haven’t met, my name is Dane Golden from VidAction, and this is the YouTube Ads Podcast, where I help the people who make it happen to drive that growth with YouTube Ads. Because while YouTube Ads was built for the big guys, anyone can do it, even you, if you follow a specific process.
And some contact info. If you have questions about this episode or YouTube Ads in general, text me at 4 1 5 4 3 9 0 6 3 9. That’s 4 1 5. HEY-0-NEW. Or you can email me at Dane, DANE at VidAction.TV, V-I-D-A-C-T-I-O-N .tv. Plus I’ve even got a great newsletter. Subscribe to that below.
So the YouTube funnel for startups.
So what does that funnel look like for startups on YouTube? With startups, your eventual goal is some sort of transaction, right? But I don’t think that’s the main goal directly from YouTube. So, so what is the Key Performance Indicator, the KPI, that you’re trying to get from a YouTube video viewer?
What is it? What’s the goal? Whether it’s an ad or it’s organic content? And I use the word “organic” a lot, so let’s just define organic videos as videos you upload that aren’t used as YouTube Ads. They’re not amplified as YouTube Ads. Both sit on your channel. One is a YouTube Ad, one is organic. Well, my answer to what your goal should be, as a startup from YouTube, and this may surprise you, is that you’re trying to get an email address. And why do I say from a YouTube channel, from a YouTube Ad, that your goal is to try to get an email address and not a transaction? Well, the truth is, is that you can’t have any transaction of any sort, on the internet without an email address. Maybe there’s some exceptions, but not a lot. Also, you can’t truly communicate at your own pace with a potential customer without an email address. Which you can do through email marketing.
We could call it “nurturing.” That’s another buzzword. Depending on the situation, these email addresses can be of a widely varying value. But I see the goal of any startup doing YouTube is to get an email address of that potential customer. Now, here’s a surprise for you. It’s important for creators too. The best and most financially-successful creators will usually tell you that they also wish they had started their email list earlier and built the list bigger, earlier. So one of our main goals is to grow that email list. That’s a primary goal. But how do we do that? Well, we offer something of value, called a “lead magnet,” right? That lead magnet has a “landing page.” These are more buzzwords – lead magnet, landing page – and that’s where the lead magnet is presented. So that’s just a page on your website. By the way, I’m going to define a landing page as any page where something is either sold or offered for free. It’s a destination you point to as a focus of your website, your ad, your video, or social media post.
And our goal with YouTube Ads for Startups is to get you your best kind of user to that lead magnet download page.
And that should be the same goal, whether it’s an organic video or a paid video.
And creator versus startup approaches. Now with a creator, your first goal. It’s to get viewers to click right? Then watch as much as possible on the video, hopefully watch the next video, subscribe, etc. And you do that by creating, engaging, helpful content that aligns with your channel’s theme or goal or mission.
It might be to entertain, might be to inform, but it engages in some way to keep viewers returning. That’s how you grow a channel, right? Because the algorithm celebrates and it supports channels that do this frequently. Then there’s something called the YouTube Ads Algorithm – lesser well known. It has its own way of working too.
It’s less dependent on what you did in the past and what you did on your channel yesterday or the day before, or how long your channel’s been around, or how many likes or views you have. It’s more dependent on the quality of your ad, getting people to click, and the quality of your targeting and pricing and relationship to your potential customer.
So you have to choose a strategy.
Now, both approaches are really good ways of growing a business. One is sort of a slow burn. One’s the fast burn. Because, really, organic and paid, they both cost time and money, just in different parts. Ads cost more money, while growing organically – it costs more time, right? Question is, how much time do you have versus how much money do you have?
This should guide how you approach YouTube with an emphasis on ads or on organic content.
Now, some of the channels and creators definitely get very fortunate in becoming immediate hits. They get attention immediately. They grow very fast. They’re profitable almost right away.
People keep coming back. Some are business related in some way, but these are rare, because organic success on YouTube usually takes time, right? Like we said, 18 months to three years. Now, when creators do blow up, they can get their content sponsored, right? And importantly, as a startup, you can sponsor this content.
So let’s talk about influencer marketing and sponsored content. Now note that influencers don’t really call themselves influencers all the time. Sometimes they refer to themselves as creators. And they don’t always call sponsorships, sponsorships. They often call them brand deals. So this language can vary a bit depending on who’s doing the talking. Influencer marketing is another way that some businesses grow very quickly. They just sponsor creators. And hopefully it’s a creator that has some experience and interest in whatever product you sell.
And there’s also something called affiliate marketing where you encourage creators to talk about or promote your product or service, and you pay them a commission based on whatever attribution you can make toward the sale.
But there is a problem tracking sales or conversion. And we call this attribution challenges. I think we should talk about attribution for a second, because attribution is getting harder in every way.
So what is attribution? Simply put, attribution is just tracking where a sale or a traffic or a lead came from. Now, no matter what part of the funnel or the flywheel you’re talking about, attribution is hard and getting harder all the time. There are lots of people that say they can help you with it, but in the end, there’s a huge amount of leads in sales where you’re just not a hundred percent sure how they happened.
Attribution is giving credit to some sort of source for creating a sale, but what it really means is just bringing traffic to your website that converts into a sale. It could be from Google or a Google ad, YouTube or a YouTube ad. Instagram. An Instagram ad. Your newsletter, a creator, an influencer, or someone’s website. That just links to your website. And there’s also a lot of traffic you see in Google Analytics that’s just called Direct, which is basically untracked traffic.
Someone just on a total whim decided to type in your address, but we know that really doesn’t happen. Somehow they found out about you. You’re just not able to know what that way is. You can guess. just don’t know what that way is.
Now, let’s talk about something called “First Click Attribution” versus “Last Click Attribution.” As we all know, most people don’t buy the first time they hear about what you’re doing. They have to hear about it more than once. Sometimes, a lot of times. What does hear about it mean in this context? Well, they might see you on social media, see you on YouTube, do their own research about you.
They’re going to Google you. It’s very unlikely, the first time they hear about you, they’re going to go from click to sale. Now, there are some things that can get people from A to B faster. Lead magnets are one of them. Quiz funnels, it’s basically a lead magnet, isn’t it? It’s another very effective way where you ask people a lot of voluntary questions, and then they’re on your email list and you know more about them when you’re sending them emails.
But essentially as customers, we have to hear about your brand and your product and your service a few times in a few places before we actually decide to try you out. So that’s the “Customer Journey.”
And the internet has always been bad at tracking, “Which was the biggest reason, or the order of reasons, in which people learned about you?” They might see a post on social media, then they Google you.
Then they watch a YouTube video. Go to your website, subscribe to your email list, and buy from you. They may be doing this on different devices. Some they’re logged in, some they’re not.
Now, which was the reason they bought from you? It’s hard to say. It’s part of the customer journey.
But we don’t know everything about the customer journey. We only know some things.
Now, let’s think about this for a second. If you only got credit for that very last click, the click before they purchased, that would be sort of like saying… If we’re going to use a restaurant analogy, let’s use a national chain like the Olive Garden.
Everyone’s heard of the Olive Garden. Now, they do a lot of advertising, social media, etc.
But who should they give credit to for bringing people into the restaurant? Well, if it was the actual person that brought them into the restaurant, that’s the host or hostess, right? That’s the person who opens the door and says, “Welcome to the Olive Garden. You’re family.” Is that their ad?
” Welcome to the Olive Garden if you’re here, you’re family.” I think that’s it. So in this last click scenario, all the credit for the sale, for bringing in that person, for bringing all that money, that would all go to the host or hostess because they were the ones that let the people into the restaurant.
They opened the door. They went from outside to inside. Now, host and hostesses are important to restaurants. Absolutely. I’ve worked as one, but generally restaurateurs don’t pay them the highest. They’re some of the entry level positions that someone takes before they become a waiter or a waitress that makes more money.
So they’re important, but for the Olive Garden, they may not be considered the most important person in making a sale. You’d have to attribute that to the ads and social media campaigns, right? Now once someone is a customer, or they’ve been there before, then they have a different reason for going there.
They’re sort of lower on the funnel, right? They are returning instead of coming in as a cold lead.
They’re sort of closer to the center of our flywheel. Right? But what about first attribution? That’s maybe the first person you tell about something or the first ad you saw. But that isn’t necessarily the best time either to accredit the entire value of the sale.
Really, it’s the entire customer journey. It’s all the contacts, it’s the ads, it’s the emails, it’s the social media, and it’s the hostess too. And that’s the trouble with attribution.
Someone may see you in a YouTube ad or social media, then they may Google you, then they may subscribe. Or with influencer marketing, they may hear about you and then they click, but then not buy. So that influencer doesn’t always get the credit. Neither does the YouTube Ad or the Google Ad.
Now there’s a number of services that can help businesses understand attribution. Some are better than others. But I just am not a believer that there’s a real absolute way of just having this entire thing dialed in.
Some additional challenges to that core method. The cookie, or you might call it a pixel, or a few other tracking methods, are now being blocked more often on more platforms: mobile, browsers, etc. People have more options for blocking that information.
So how do people actually find you? Well let’s talk about targeting in the Google and YouTube ecosystem. It’s more difficult to attribute, more difficult to remarket, and more difficult to target than it ever was. And yet there’s still some methods, for instance, on YouTube, if someone’s just searched for a specific thing, they are already in that environment.
You don’t need a cookie.
You don’t need a cookie. They’re signed in. They’re in this environment. We know they’ve searched for this because it’s in their history. So YouTube can say, well show them this ad.
And because YouTube is part of the Google experience, you can also target them based on what they’ve searched for on Google. And you can also track people based on similar websites they look at because hey, each website uses Google Analytics. So Google Analytics knows where you’ve been. Sorry to tell you this, if you didn’t know.
So you can target people who look at your competitor’s websites because there’s Google Analytics on their website, most likely. So Google can tell you how to target.
YouTube is going to feed people basically what they’ve shown interest in before. Generally they build up some sort of anonymous profile on you. They say, well, people who like A, usually like B. And you’ve seen this same type of thing on Amazon. People who are like, you, like this. And it’s the same with YouTube.
Now, ideally, you wouldn’t have to run any YouTube Ads at all because YouTube would already show your video, your ad to people who wanted to see it and wanted to buy something from you. But that’s not really a hundred percent effective.
We have to pay to get seen by more people because that’s how YouTube makes their money.
Different goals, different approaches.
Sometimes marketing is about going out and finding those people that technology can’t find or won’t find for us. Or won’t find for us for free. Sometimes that also means targeting some of the wrong people, unfortunately, that you think are the right people because you’re experimenting and you’re seeing what works.
But again, the goal of running YouTube Ads is not to grow your YouTube channel. The goal of running YouTube Ads is to get more signups, sales and leads. So they’re very different goals. If your goal is to grow on YouTube, grow your channel, or you have some other reason to be a creator, that’s a fantastic goal.
It’s one that takes time and effort and work, and especially if you’re editing your own content, it takes a lot of work. If you can do that and you can grow that way, that’s better than YouTube Ads. If you have the time, the strategy and your market is the right size, meaning you have enough customers of people who would potentially be your YouTube viewer or subscriber, that’s a better way, if you can do it really fast before your startup runs out of cash.
But if you don’t have that time and you have some cash to invest in, experiment with a YouTube Ads strategy, it’s a faster approach. It’s not guaranteed by any means, but it is faster.
And again, my name is Dane Golden from VidAction, and this is the YouTube Ads podcast where I help the people who make it happen drive that growth with YouTube Ads. Because while YouTube Ads was built for the big guys, anyone can do it. Yes. Even you. Yes, even you if you follow a specific process.
And some contact info for me, if you have questions about this episode or YouTube Ads in general, text me at 4 1 5 4 3 9 0 6 3 9. That’s 4 1 5. HEY-0NEW. Or email me at Dane at VidAction tv. Plus I’ve even got a great newsletter. Subscribe to that below.
And I’ll see you in the next video.