I built a tool to scratch my own itch
A few months ago I was trying to find YouTube creators to promote one of my SaaS products. Simple enough task, right?
Wrong.
Every search led to either massive influencer platforms priced for enterprise budgets, generic Google searches that wasted hours, or creators who had no interest in affiliate deals. I couldn't find a fast, reliable way to identify which YouTube creators were actually open to partnerships — and which ones were already monetising through affiliate links.
So I built Affilitube.
It searches YouTube by niche or keyword, scores channels by affiliate potential, detects existing affiliate links and sponsorship history in video descriptions, and generates AI-personalised outreach emails based on each creator's actual content. What used to take me hours now takes minutes.
I've been building it for a few months, launched two weeks ago, have early users giving positive feedback, and I'm launching on Product Hunt on Monday.
The stack is Claude AI for the email generation and Emergent for the build. No team, no funding, just me.
A few things I've learned so far:
The hardest part isn't building the tool, it's finding the right affiliates to promote the tool itself
YouTube is massively underserved compared to Instagram and TikTok for affiliate discovery
Solo building with AI tools has completely changed what's possible for one person
Happy to answer any questions — and if you're building something that needs YouTube affiliates, give Affilitube a try. There's a free plan.
FutureMindAI — you nailed the insight: finding affiliates is the hard part. But there's another layer — the SaaS founders who land on Affilitube's page and could become paying customers are also skeptical buyers. They've been burned by enterprise platforms before. If your page doesn't immediately kill that skepticism, they take the free plan and never upgrade. That free-to-paid gap is a conversion leak. I audit exactly that — want me to find it?