TubeBuddy / BENlabs · 2021–2022
Creating Alignment When No One Agreed on the Future
A director remaking a beloved film needed the original house. The studio said no budget. The agency found natural placements in the script — brands paid to be in the film, the director got their vision funded, audiences got a better movie. Everyone won.
BEN had done this for decades in Hollywood. But the agency model was breaking — understaffed, overworked, every deal requiring human touch. They acquired TubeBuddy (YouTube's largest creator tool) hoping software could change that. The problem? No one agreed on what the combined company actually was. I led the research and vision work that showed both sides a shared future — and earned Bill Gates' endorsement along the way.
The Situation
BEN's agency model was human-capital intensive — every brand deal required people finding creators, negotiating terms, managing campaigns. The team was understaffed and overworked. Leadership didn't believe the agency model alone had a bright future.
TubeBuddy had its own problems. The founders exited with the acquisition — and they hadn't left a vision behind. The product had been built without designers, so there was years of UX debt. Ten million installs and deep YouTube integration, but no direction for where it was going next.
When I joined, neither side had a clear path forward on their own, and together they hadn't figured out how their work connected. No shared roadmap, no unified vision, and a lot of fear.
Agency feared software
Many saw it as a threat to their jobs, not a tool to help them do better work.
No shared language
Agency spoke in campaigns and relationships. Software spoke in features and sprints. They weren't having the same conversation.
A market moment
iOS 14.5 had just gutted Facebook ad targeting. Brands that relied on pixel-based tracking were suddenly looking for new ways to reach audiences — and creators had the authentic reach they needed.
What I Did First
I didn't wait to be assigned work. I started research immediately — looking for the shared story that could unite skeptical teams around a common future.
- Stakeholder immersion Understanding fears, hopes, and mental models across both organizations
- Jobs-to-be-done research Interviewing creators and brands about what they're actually trying to accomplish
- Competitive analysis Mapping the landscape to find gaps and opportunities others were missing
- Positioning workshops Finding what both businesses could uniquely offer together
The Hard Calls
Vision work is about making choices that give teams direction while leaving room for them to discover the right solutions. Here's what we decided — and what we consciously chose not to do.
Lead with agency value, not creator features
We always planned powerful creator tools — this wasn't about deprioritizing one side. But the company was agency-first and skeptical of software. If agency teams felt threatened, nothing would ship.
VisionType I led with brand campaign workflows, showing how software helps agency people with the hard parts of their jobs.
Show automation as a spectrum
Full automation would be faster and more scalable. But agency expertise was real — human curation mattered for high-budget campaigns.
We designed a spectrum from "fully automated" to "hire our team." Brands choose based on budget and comfort level. Agency expertise stays valuable.
Show enough depth to build trust
We could have shipped a lighter vision deck — fewer screens, more hand-waving. But skeptical stakeholders need to see specifics. "Trust me, it'll work" doesn't cut it with agency people who've been burned by software promises.
Co-owning the vision with the Head of Product, I designed enough depth that teams could see real workflows, not just concepts.
The Vision
A platform where brands define what they need, creators see opportunities that fit, and the right matches happen without friction.
Brands describe their target audience, campaign concept, inspiration, and budget. Then choose their level of involvement — from fully automated matching to "hire our team" for high-touch campaigns. Agency expertise stays valuable.
"Adobe would like to collaborate with you." When there's genuine fit between a brand's goals and a creator's audience, creators see opportunities — not random ads, but partnerships that make sense for their content.
Creators review the brief, decide if it fits their content strategy, and add it to their campaign calendar. The platform shows audience overlap, topic fit, and helps them plan how the content fits their broader strategy.
Brands see their campaigns, matched creators, and performance metrics — the familiar workflows agency teams use daily, now with software leverage. Creators have their own view into active collaborations and upcoming deliverables.
What Happened
“Confidentially, Bill said ‘looks like a good product’”Tyler Folkman, CTO, after presenting to Bill Gates
Bill Gates (BEN's sole shareholder via Cascade Investments) saw VisionType I. The feedback led to increased investment in the vision.
More importantly, agency and software teams saw a shared future for the first time. The vision didn't solve everything — organizational change is hard and ongoing — but it gave teams something to align around.
What Happened Next
VisionType I validated the direction. But leadership shifted to VisionType II — a more flexible, Notion-like systems platform. The Head of Product believed "every creator is different" required infinite customization.
Where I Disagreed
I pushed back — with data. I'd audited the flexible, systems-style products — Notion, Mem, Obsidian, ClickUp, Airtable, Coda, Tana, among others — and one pattern kept repeating: outsized investment in onboarding. Guided setup flows to save users from the blank canvas. Step-by-step walkthroughs. Video tutorials embedded directly in the UI. Template galleries everywhere. Standard-sounding features — but invested in at a scale most SaaS never needs. When a product requires that much teaching, it's telling you users can't intuitively see what to do with it.
We were living the same evidence internally: Notion was meant to be our standard for documentation, and we struggled to get much of the team to actually use it. And I'd seen the pattern years earlier, consulting for a startup with no experienced product person on the team — badly behind schedule because it kept building customization, in part because it hadn't done the research to know what its users actually wanted.
To be clear, I wasn't against flexibility — I was against unexamined flexibility. The same research doubled as a map of what it would take to do a systems platform well if we committed to that path. I believed in common patterns: nail the workflows first, add smart flexibility where it earns its place.
The Head of Product made a different call. I still think specific workflows with the right amount of flexibility beat infinite customization — and AI may well change that equation. But the starting point doesn't: understand what users actually need first.