Introducing the YouTube Creator Research Agent (v1)

Finding the right creators was never a skill issue

For many moons, I assumed creator marketing just wasn't something most businesses could pull off. At my previous startup, we had every reason to run influencer campaigns (our audience basically lived on YouTube) and we were never able to build a successful program. Not for lack of caring, mostly for the sheer amount of work.

Every time, we'd get serious about launching a new campaign, and we'd hit a wall: to do it right you had to

1. Find the right channels
2. Actually watch their content
3. Judge whether the audience was real and relevant
4. Dig through which brands already sponsored creators like them
5. Then do all of that across enough candidates to build a good shortlist.

That's most of a week or two before you've even messaged a single creator (and that's just the first half… from there comes all the other stuff: outreach, negotiation, creative, attribution, and then iterating onto the next campaign). So we never managed to do it. And it's why most brands who try it fail.

But then, we actually did, well, at volume. After we exited Uptrends and started Babbl Labs, brands started asking us to run their influencer programs across YouTube for them. And so slowly, surely, we figured it out. At this point we've run hundreds of creator partnerships for clients. And it's taught me the most important lesson:

What keeps most brands out of creator marketing isn't talent. It's logistics. The people who are great at it are genuinely great, with a real nose for fit, and real relationships with creators. Hard-won skills. Deciding on a good creator takes minutes. But getting to the point where you can decide takes days. We were never short on judgment. We were short on the hours it took to earn the right to use it.

Everyone wants creators. No one has time to find good ones.

Today this matters more than ever, because in 2026 the whole economy is reorienting around creator marketing. Brands, startups, funds, agencies- everyone with $100K+ marketing spend knows creators must be part of the budget. Attention has left the places we used to track it, and it's moved to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify.

YouTube in particular, is the giant. For a few reasons: it's the second largest search engine on the planet behind Google. It owns the living room TV and a big share of commute time. And viewers trust long-form, YouTube-style content more than any short-form infinite scroll feed. When a YouTuber recommends or reviews something, people buy it (more than anywhere else). And with how GEO and SEO have evolved the past few years, it's about to matter a lot more than we even realize.

So.. here's where we come in. We didn't really set out to build software, the past few months we have been dead-set on simply running great creator campaigns for our clients. After doing it by hand hundreds of times, and hitting the same wall again and again, it became obvious that the wall was the thing worth solving. So, we poured everything we'd learned into just that. And after months of building, putting it to work for our own client campaigns, we are excited to make it public.

Our YouTube Creator Research Agent (v1)

The idea is simple: an agent that can find, research, and connect you with all of the perfect YouTube creators to promote your brand, in minutes.

You tell the agent what you're looking for - give it a prompt, your business URL, info about your audience, the kind of channels you like - and then it goes out and does the research. Not a database query, actual searching. It 'watches' thousands of videos, simulating your customers' behavior, reading channels, checking sponsor history, weighing fit. And then it hands you back a short list of channels with reasons attached:

More Than a DB. Faster and Cheaper than an Agency.

Here's the key distinction that matters, because people will ask me 'how this is different' from the lists and databases and agency services that are already out there.

A database hands you rows. It's a filing cabinet- you still have to open the drawers, read the results, give it filters, do the thinking and research yourself. An agency, on the other hand, will do the thinking for you, and then charge you an arm and a leg for it. There's a huge gap between a $100 database subscription like Modash or IQfluence, and a $5K/mo agency.

What we're building is an agent. It does agency-quality work, at database subscription-level pricing. For every creator it surfaces, it has already asked the important questions you would have asked:

• Is this audience relevant to what I sell?
• Is the sponsorship quality there? or do they just promote anything?
• How big is the reach, not just the subscriber count?
• Are they already working with our competitors?
• Does their audience trust what they have to say?

And a million more things you could ask. The agent scores every creator across dozens of categories, and triangulates their 'fit' to your brand based on a few main pillars: relevance, sponsor quality, audience reach, campaign fit, and trust. Ultimately- the idea is an agent that doesn't come back to you with a haystack of names and a 'good luck', but a short list of highly-vetted, curated names worth your time, with reasoning.

And for a growing share of those creators, we've already knocked down the next step too. We've onboarded hundreds of opted-in creators to our preferred partner program with verified contact path, real sponsor rates, and actual audience demographics. So when the agent surfaces one of them, it isn't a name you have to go track down. It's a one-click intro to someone who has already raised their hand.

Who This is For

Our v1 YouTube research agent is built for brands and agencies looking to run YouTube creator partnerships. From Seed-stage startups looking for their first creator bets, to small agencies who don't have the research teams but need to move fast. If you're doing manual creator research right now (or avoiding it at all costs), you're the person we've built this for.

And no, it doesn't replace your judgement. That's the whole point. It does the part that was always grunt work and hands the decision back to you, with everything you need to make it well, and iterate fast from there. You're still the one who picks. You just no longer need to be the one scrolling for six hours first.

Where This Goes

This is our v1, and it's just the start.

The reason we're excited isn't really this one agent. It's what this sits on top of and what comes next. Underneath is a layer of structured signal we've built over the past year+, with first-party data from real creators and brands. Info about who sponsors whom, pricing, niche performance, trends, and more.

Creator research for YouTube is the first leg. And I'm extremely excited to share what comes next (more on that next time). What it means for now, for you, is that the agent gets sharper as you use it, as the layer underneath gets deeper, and as the questions you ask it continue to expand.

Because remember, the shortlist was only ever the beginning. After it comes the rest of the gauntlet - outreach, hoping a handful of people reply, negotiating pricing and terms, signing the deal, workshopping the creative, waiting weeks for the content to actually go out, praying you can attribute whether any of it worked, and then doing the whole thing over again.

Every one of those steps is the same shape as the research problem - too much manual work standing between you and a decision. That's the roadmap. We're starting with the part that blocked us first, on the platform that blocked us most, and we're working our way down the rest.

Who We Are

Lastly, a quick word on this, because it shapes what the product is. We're a small team, and we like it that way. We've spent the past 5 years building data infrastructure for hedge funds, PR firms, and marketing teams.

And today, the thing we care about is whether the output actually moves something for you - a partnership you'd never have found, a weekend you got back. We deliberately didn't build a giant feature surface you have to learn. We built one thing that does the annoying part well.

And I hope you like it. If you buy the vision, I'd love to chat. We'll be doing this thing in public, posting our wins and losses, mapping the journey along the way so that others can see what it's like.

Cheers to making creator partnerships something every brand can manage.

Peace,
Ramsey & Sam