TubeBuddy / BENlabs · 2021 – Present
Creating Alignment When No One Agreed on the Future
First 60 days From joining to a shared product vision
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. Within my first 60 days, I led the research and vision work that showed both sides a shared future. The direction went on to earn Bill Gates' endorsement.
30-second read
What matters in this case
- The challenge
- An acquired agency and software business had different incentives, language, and beliefs about the future.
- My contribution
- I began research immediately, surfaced the jobs both sides shared, and co-authored a product vision teams could use to make decisions.
- The result
- The organization gained a shared direction, a clearer creator-platform story, and positive investor feedback on the concept.
- Pivotal decision
- I sequenced the vision around agency value first so the transformation could earn trust instead of triggering more resistance.
- 10M+
- TubeBuddy installs in the product context
- 60 days
- From joining to a shared product vision
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.
- Split the immersion Two organizations was more than one person could learn properly at once. I encouraged Brian, one of my designers, to go deep on one side of the business while I worked to understand the other — still learning both, but with someone dedicated to each.
- 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 Once there was enough shared understanding to build on, I ran workshops with people from across both organizations — agency and software, not just design — to find what the combined business could uniquely offer. Getting both sides in the same room was most of the value.
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.
I designed a shared coordination layer for every creator deliverable — accepted, in progress, ready for review, scheduled, and published. Both sides could see what was moving, what needed attention, and what came next.
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, but much of the team had a hard time adopting 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 — and I took on the challenge with real excitement, becoming one of the two main authors of VisionType II alongside him. That stretch produced some of the collaboration I enjoyed most: the two of us thinking deeply about the system together — what capabilities it needed, how each one would work, how they'd interact. Disagreeing with a direction has never meant withholding my best work from it.
That exploration included designing AI agents as collaborators in the future product vision and building early working prototypes before native agent tooling was widely available. Those prototypes were exploratory rather than shipped product features. Later, Nick Johnson and I partnered on some of the first working agents in our codebase. We each created agents and helped refine one another's work, turning the broader idea into a practical way of working.
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.