How Clerk Partners with YouTube’s Dev Community
A strategic playbook for engaging developers via authentic partnerships
Introduction
In 2024, most people are easily swayed by the content influencers share across their platforms. While the B2C influencer market is hyper-saturated, content creators in the B2B space have adopted a similar playbook that is becoming a clear growth lever — to the extent that some founders are jumping on the bandwagon to take on the influencer persona themselves.
Particularly in the Developer Tools sector — where community has been the name of the game for years –– “marketing” has their sights set on creating awareness and building trust within the developer community. The tech industry moves quickly and developers are constantly evaluating which languages, frameworks, and tools will help increase their velocity to ship polished user experiences.
“YouTube has become a trusted platform where developers can go to be informed of the best new tools and strategies with confidence and ease. The platform offers developers on-demand access to a wide spectrum of content to grow their skill set and become more marketable, no matter their role or level of experience.” - Alex Rapp, Clerk
Despite the significant influence creators have on B2B brand building (and the bottom line), most companies are dropping the ball. They drown in cumbersome analytics and operations, and force guidelines and briefs onto creators, undermining the very authenticity that makes these collaborations valuable.
In this post, we'll show how Clerk — with the help of Gonto and the HyperGrowth Partners team — tackled this challenge, sharing roadblocks and learnings that allowed them to transform YouTube into a top performing full-funnel pipeline.
Learnings from pilot partnerships
When kicking off Clerk’s YouTube partnership program, Gonto and Nick Parsons, Director of Marketing at Clerk, zeroed in on YouTubers as the initial core personas. But why?
The YouTube algorithm is one of the best recommendation engines on the internet, giving marketers confidence they’re reaching an engaged and high-intent audience. YouTube also favors long-form content, such as how-to’s and tutorials, that can have a long shelf life due to viewers continually consuming the content despite the publication date.
Last summer, Nick started by reaching out to creators that were a fit for Clerk's solution and simply asked if they'd be interested in trying Clerk. By giving the creator a test drive, Clerk quickly realized that it became easier to find authentic partnerships.
The emphasis was on maintaining an organic and personal vibe in communications to foster genuine relationships.
“We wanted to avoid cringey sales pitches and instead give developers the chance to experience Clerk’s 'aha' moment on their own, showing them both the developer and user experience rather than selling them in a 30-second mid-roll ad.” - Nick
The pilot experiment included three long-form videos solely featuring Clerk, which did not move the dial on the metrics they were hoping to influence. However, these learnings began to shape Clerk’s future YouTube partnerships.
The initial integrations did drive awareness, but accompanied by some negative sentiment. In connecting with some viewers of these early integrations, the Clerk team learned they built the impression of: "These guys are paying people to talk good about them," which is not how Clerk wanted to be perceived. Moreover, these videos didn't impact important metrics like account sign ups and activations.
Faced with additional issues of poor attribution and tracking effectiveness, these learnings showed that Clerk needed to experiment with a new approach more in-line with their core values and one that spoke to developers, rather than selling.
“We wanted the viewing experience to be authentic, so we decided to change direction.” - Nick
From then onwards, Nick and Gonto committed to giving creators full creative freedom to showcase Clerk’s features they were most passionate about and even call out product bugs in their content.
“At the end of the day, we learned that developers don’t want to just learn new frameworks and services in a vacuum, but in the context of learning how to create entire apps, like an Uber or ChatGPT clone. That’s why we prompted creators to use Clerk as one of the tools in the toolbox for creating those apps. And that performed drastically better.” - Gonto
Clerk advocated creators recommend their own content topics but suggested ideas that were popular in the developer community, such as "how to build a ChatGPT clone" or "how to build a project management app," to attract relevant audiences. By positioning themselves as just another part of the tech stack, not the focus of the video, Clerk hoped to achieve the organic integration they sought to test.
After running a few more integrations as part of the pilot, the team validated the above hypothesis by observing that the base of sign ups started to increase. Armed with this new direction and positive results, the team was ready to scale the channel to a proper growth program.
From pilot to partnership program
After the initial pilot, Clerk hired Alex Rapp, who grew YouTube into a full-fledged creator program, rapidly achieving step growth for the channel.
Solving attribution
To enhance tracking effectiveness, Alex introduced branded attribution links in video descriptions to give a more organic appearance and built a reporting suite that eased the process of measuring effectiveness at macro & micro levels.
Despite these efforts, the team noticed a significant proportion of sign ups were still coming from a “halo effect” rather than directly from the attribution links. On days where partner videos went live, Alex observed an uptick in sign ups attributed to direct traffic and organic search. It’s well documented that developers are keen to avoid being tracked, so this was no surprise. The team quickly learned that these ‘hard to measure’ channels followed a similar trend to their YouTube-attributed sign ups. This allowed them to directionally attribute sign ups to specific videos, even when the traffic hadn’t come directly from one of their attribution links.
All of that being said, the attribution links did contribute to their ability to directionally measure impact and opened doors to more avenues of growth and experimentation. For example:
Building retargeting audiences from partner channels
Running in-feed YouTube ads of partner content they’d sponsored to extend reach
Re-distributing sponsored content to other channels (e.g. newsletters, dev.to, etc.)
Automating creator scouting
With attribution basics out of the way, scaling partnerships became the next priority. The strategy here was two-prong:
The team began by manually searching YouTube for mentions of ‘Clerk’ in video titles, descriptions, and transcripts to identify creators who were already using Clerk in their tutorials. This approach indicated positive brand awareness and creator affinity for Clerk.
The team expanded their search to identify creators working within frameworks and libraries supported by Clerk, such as Next.js, React, and React Native.
They automated both steps by creating a YouTube scraper integrated into their Hex reporting environment, drastically reducing the manual burden. Developed internally by one of their data engineers in just one day, the script crawled public YouTube data daily for specific keywords like ‘Clerk’ or ‘Clerk Authentication’.
Looking to engage the developer community like Clerk did? Let us help you become a trusted DevTool brand while maximizing your returns.
Scouting creators
When evaluating potential partners, Clerk leveraged YouTube’s native metrics and Social Blade, among other tactics, to assess key performance potential signals:
Monthly channel growth trends, using 10,000 subscribers as a soft minimum threshold
Views-to-subscriber ratio to gauge audience engagement
Community interaction through likes, comments, and Q&A participation
A consistent production schedule to ensure ongoing engagement with their audience
Overall, Clerk prioritized growth potential over audience size. The partnerships were split:
40% established creators with established audiences, whose growth curve wasn’t as sharp — these creators leaned into production quality and brand equity value, which comes with all the related positive associations.
60% up-and-coming creators for cost-effectiveness and future potential — these were not just value-for-money bets, but faster-growing ones they could invest in and “grow together with”.
Granting full creator autonomy
What set Clerk’s creator program apart was their outreach and collaboration process. It was entirely rooted in granting total creative freedom to foster genuine partnerships with creators.
Keeping outreach casual
Alex built on the personal outreach Nick had created and shared additional partnership benefits, including creative authority, no deadlines, and performance insights to name a few.
This email was followed by a face-to-face meeting to get to know one another and iron out what an ideal partnership looks like for both parties, strengthening the human relationship and ensuring the creator & Clerk were on the same page.
Creative collaboration > Pitch
When discussing partnerships, Alex encouraged creators to speak authentically about the product, even if it involved flagging product bugs.
Rather than dictating the messaging, the team leveraged their Clerk expertise to help creators identify features that would best resonate with their audiences and the content topic. To foster creative brainstorming, Clerk would occasionally share content topics based on the latest trends in the developer community — for example, how to build an app that uses the latest version of Claude 3.5 Sonet. However, Clerk ultimately left final content decisions up to the creator, in the spirit of giving them full autonomy.
“This approach empowered creators to showcase the product authentically, resonating more deeply with their audiences, because they were able to build applications they were genuinely excited about. In the end, the creator knows their audience best, and we didn’t want to add friction to what they’ve worked so hard to create.” - Alex
Flexible production schedule
To accommodate the creators' workflows, Clerk also gave them full flexibility by not enforcing deadlines for when content would be published. This allowed creators to focus on producing high-quality work they could be proud of, without the pressure of adjusting complex production schedules to meet artificial deadlines.
“We aimed for quality over quantity, fostering a frictionless environment for creators to build.” - Alex
Creator dedicated communication lines
To simplify collaboration, Alex established dedicated Discord or Slack channels for each partner that included technical experts from the Clerk team. Both parties used these communication channels to ideate, troubleshoot, and take care of logistics in a speedy manner.
“Collaborating through email was far too cumbersome for us and our partners. Setting up comms in Discord was a no-brainer since that’s what developers use already. Creating dedicated channels, rather than pointing them to our support channel, gave them a fast lane to our team.” - Alex
Partner compensation and management
When it comes to partner compensation, Clerk offered monetary incentives on a per-video basis.
Clerk allows creators to propose their preferred compensation per video, trusting their insight into what it takes to produce the quality content their subscribers expect. Initially, Alex used scouting signals to negotiate fair compensation. In the present, he’s built a normative database, inclusive of efficiency benchmarks, that more precisely guide negotiations — especially during their ‘experimental phase’.
Partnership experimental phase
To kick off the partnership, they suggest an initial scope of 3 to 5 video integrations to understand how Clerk resonated among the creators' audiences.
“The experimental phase gave me enough confidence in the performance we were seeing to either extend the partnership or pause efforts. In some cases, we’d make recommendations to improve engagement and sometimes it’s just not a good fit, but that’s alright. If Clerk wasn’t resonating with a creator’s audience, we didn’t want to force the issue.” - Alex
Sharing insights
Alex and team shared transparent feedback on video performance. By highlighting winning themes alongside key metrics, Clerk provided creators with directional reporting to improve their content, giving them indications on how they performed compared to their benchmarks. In some cases, they also shared learnings from more established creators to help grow their channels. The emphasis was on a mutual partnership, not just driving Clerk’s metrics or funding a creator’s channel.
“This feedback loop empowered creators to refine their work, enhance their content, its impact, and our overall relationship — they wanted to continue partnering with us because we gave them data to be successful. Surprisingly, this was novel to some partners and something they’ve been asking for but weren’t getting from other sponsors.” - Alex
As partnerships grew, Clerk introduced creators to other developer tool teams within its network. This fostered content diversity, expanded reach, and unlocked additional developer tool networks, sometimes reducing Clerk’s partnership costs and enhancing mutual benefits.
Additional incentives tactics
Gonto tested other incentive tactics with HyperGrowth Partners portfolio companies, besides Clerk, including:
Experimenting with a performance-based CPM model ranging from $20 to $55 for every 1,000 views a video accumulated
Requesting a ‘make good’ if the first integration didn’t reach a minimum threshold of views
Capping the viewership amount in the first two months to evaluate performance and payments
Processing learnings and results
Scaling their YouTube program sharpened Alex’s focus on collecting results and insights to assess its effectiveness.
Setting up actionable reporting
Alex unlocked partnership performance by leveraging BI tools like Hex and Notion that were fueled by Clerk’s backend database. This allowed Alex to easily create a normative database, establishing performance benchmarks, efficiency tiers, and easily capture findings to continually optimize performance.
The reporting suite is updated at specific milestones, post-publish, to account for the long-tail effects of partner integration allowing him to understand the different stages of growth, signaling which partners excel at SEO practices.
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Youtube’s full funnel impact
Despite the known challenges of attribution, further data analysis yielded deeper learnings for the Clerk team. They understand that YouTube partnerships aren’t just a direct conversion play, but can also influence every layer of the funnel.
“Once we established our normative database, it became evident that some partners were better at driving sign ups & installations than others. Rather than writing off the lower converting partners, we saw they were able to contribute to our success by filling the top layers of the conversion funnel.” - Alex
Top Funnel: Increase in brand awareness and engaged site visitors
Mid-Funnel: An organic increase in the number of creators using Clerk in tutorials; Increased engagement in partner video comment sections
Bottom Funnel: Step level growth in sign up/installation volume while retaining above industry average conversion rates
“Starting with 3-5 creators, we now boast 20 active partners that have driven a 30% increase in YouTube attributed sign ups as well as the strongest installation rate of any of our channels. This approach fostered genuine engagement and unlocked new avenues for growth.” - Alex
The chart above shows the daily volume of sign ups and installations, which peak when new videos were published. Not every YouTube integration had the same impact on sign ups or installations, something Clerk plans to solve for through more advanced data analysis.
These results underscored the value of the creator program and validated the hypothesis to double down on the investment.
Closing Thoughts
By fostering casual and genuine partnerships with YouTubers, Clerk successfully embedded itself into the developer community. Their approach not only enhanced their reach and adoption, but also unlocked valuable insights into audience interests and content strategies, all while keeping ops lean and casual, ultimately capturing time savings for the Clerk team.
For growth operators in the B2B SaaS space, Clerk's strategy offers a compelling blueprint for engaging creators with genuine, value-driven collaborations, which is ultimately what partnerships are all about.
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Great article and super interesting, can you share the budget you spent on this?