Jenny Hoyos grew up on YouTube. Now 18, she first started posting content when she was just eight. In her big family, all her cousins had channels, so it only felt natural that she should, too.

She also happens to come from a family of entrepreneurs. Her parents had multiple businesses and the drive to scrape and hustle was instilled in her from a young age. So it should be no surprise that Jenny decided to take her YouTube more seriously and launch a channel all about personal finance.

She had all the right equipment and all the right ambition and quickly grew her channel, now boasting 1.47 million subscribers.

Yet despite her massive success (and the topic of her channel even being money!), there was no blueprint for managing her own channel as a business. So around three months ago when brands started reaching out to make deals, she was lost.

“I literally knew nothing. I didn't know what to charge. I didn't know anything about contracts. I knew absolutely nothing when these people were reaching out to me,” she says.

Jenny has always been scrappy, so she did her best to navigate the world of YouTube sponsorships. But everyone needs help sometimes.

From hobby to career

Although Jenny has been posting content on YouTube for a decade, it was over the pandemic that she found her niche. She noticed an uptick in interest in personal finance and especially cryptocurrency, so she launched a new channel centered around those themes.

The growth was, as she describes it, exponential. It took a year to get her first 1,000 subscribers, then it turned into 10,000 over a month, then 60,000, then 100,000, then 200,000, and on and on.

Many of those jumps in subscribers were spurred by viral videos. For example, a year ago Jenny posted a video of how to get a $3 burrito at Chipotle. It blew up, got media coverage, and now sits at 15 million views.

She’s also killing it with YouTube Shorts with many of them — like finding a $5 Christmas gift or finding gold in $2 of dirt — racking up millions of views.

Jenny is now even studying finance in college and runs her channel on top of being a student.

When brands came calling

Given Jenny’s skyrocketing numbers, it was only a matter of time before brands started reaching out with sponsorship deals. Although she used to get spammy offers, the real deals started coming in about three months ago.

The problem is that it’s always been challenging to find information on how to negotiate brand deals as a creator. While some larger YouTubers may release numbers now and then, there’s no playbook for understanding benchmarks and how much to charge — and that’s especially true for creators just starting out.

One of her early tactics was joining a Discord server for creators. Members would post which brands they were working with and how much they charged, as a way of offering some transparency and comparisons to help each other out.

“I would review [those deals] and see who was a similar size to me,” says Jenny.

She also had a friend who was a fellow creator with a bit of experience negotiating brand deals. Jenny would screenshot emails from brands and send them to him, and he’d do his best to offer advice on what to charge.

It helped her get by, but Jenny just knew she was leaving money on the table.

“100% I undercharged myself so badly,” she says. “ It's almost embarrassing how bad I was undercharging myself.”

She scoured the internet for resources, which led her to find Creator Wizard, and that’s when everything changed.

Learning there’s so much to learn

Jenny had been devouring Creator Wizard’s free resources, like founder Justin Moore’s articles on negotiating creator deals, videos on how to talk with brands, and Creator Debates podcast.

At first, Jenny was pretty sure she just needed help with pricing. But she quickly realized she needed help with pretty much everything.

She compared it to the concept of the parabola of knowledge. When you first start learning a concept, you know nothing, but you know you know nothing. As you gain more knowledge you start overestimating how much you know, putting you in the tricky spot of being overconfident in your abilities. Consuming Creator Wizard’s content, she realized that’s exactly where she was.

Jenny heard about Creator Wizard by the buzz Justin has built in the creator community. She had two friends who had worked with Creator Wizard, and they suggested she check it out.

She finally reached out to Justin directly when a big offer landed in her inbox and she didn’t know how to navigate it. It was more than just sponsored videos and involved creating original content for mainstream media. It was complex and new, and Jenny didn’t know what to do.

“I had a really big opportunity and I knew I didn't want to undercharge or not negotiate properly,” she says.

“I asked my friend for help and he was like, ‘Oh, this is really complicated. This is beyond me. You need to reach out to Justin.’”

How Creator Wizard changed Jenny’s business

After Jenny had her first consultation with Justin, it opened up a whole new world of possibilities.

The first big lesson was to offer packages. It used to be that a brand would reach out and Jenny would just come up with a number. But that’s almost never the best course of action.

Creator Wizard taught her to offer a suite of packages that included not just her YouTube channel, but access to the audiences she’s built on TikTok and Instagram. Rather than a one-off video, she can offer much more value and build a deal that includes multiple channels and posts. That also lends itself to building long-lasting relationships with brands.

“Now when people reach out to me, I don't give my price immediately. I ask a bunch of questions to understand what they're looking for. Then I shoot them packages,” she says. “So that was huge.”

Along with that, she learned that it’s her job to understand the needs of the brands she’s working with. She asks questions about their goals, their target audience, and their budget. Then she’s able to craft an offer that’s more enticing.

She went through her email offers with Justin line by line, and said Justin has an amazing ability to understand those communications like a psychologist.

“He was reading these people like a book through their emails,” says Jenny.

For example, she learned that when a brand follows up very quickly, that’s often a signal that they really want to work with you and are anxious to get the partnership locked in.

As for that major deal, the brand originally wanted to do a trial run, but Justin swooped in. He advised Jenny to not only not do a trial but to offer a package of ten videos so there was a larger sample size to analyze what is (and what’s not) working.

“Not only did we do 10x the amount of videos but he also increased the rate by double, which is actually nuts,” she says.

Jenny found her confidence

There was a time when Jenny felt so lucky to be getting sponsorship offers that rocking the boat by negotiating felt risky. But that’s no longer the case.

“I would feel like this brand is [huge] and I should be happy to work with them, even for FREE. But no…it shouldn't work like that,” she says.

The thing is that Jenny fundamentally knew her value. She knew she offered brands a connection to a large and loyal audience, and that her financial expertise made her a great partner. Especially after consuming Justin’s resources, she knew that even smaller creators with fewer subscribers could land great deals.

What she was missing, however, was the confidence to ask for what she was worth. She was worried brands wouldn’t understand her pricing in the context of what she could offer them as a creator. But that’s changed, too.

She now knows exactly how to illustrate her value proposition to brands, like having case studies on hand to display her expertise. In those case studies, she documents her biggest deals and how they performed — like the engagement or conversions.

She’s also started to see herself not as a run-of-the-mill influencer, but as a consultant.

“I'm definitely a consultant because I will come to brands with a concept and optimize it to get views. I'll tell them how I'm gonna optimize it for retention and viewer satisfaction,” she says.

**“It depends on the audience that you're serving, and what value you can bring to the brand.”**

Jenny’s advice for creators

Now that Jenny has found her footing as a creator, she has advice for other YouTubers who are just starting to negotiate sponsorship deals.

1. Consult other creators

This is what got Jenny through her first deals, and is a good place to start. If you happen to have contacts who are also creators — reach out. Get details not only on pricing but on what it was like to work with the brand.

Brand deals are a two-way relationship. As a creator, you’re providing your creative services, but the brand also needs to hold up its end by being easy to work with, paying on time, and having a willingness to foster a long-term relationship.

During a negotiation, the brand isn’t just evaluating you — you should be evaluating each other.

2. Find resources online, like from Creator Wizard

Although many creators are secretive about sponsorship deals, there are resources out there like Creator Wizard that can help.

“I'd honestly go to a resource like Justin's channel to scroll through his videos,” says Jenny.

She especially recommends Justin’s video on how to pitch a brand from start to finish.

3. Quality over quantity

Jenny takes a quality-over-quantity approach to her videos, preferring to post one great video a week rather than a bunch of lower-quality content. She finds that this approach actually increases her views.

She takes the same approach to sponsorship deals. The goal isn’t to get as many deals as possible but to find great brands to work with and create long-term relationships that are valuable to both parties.

4. Invest in yourself

Creators invest in themselves all the time, whether that’s buying new equipment or going on a trip to make new content. But Jenny says you need to think about the return on your investments.

For what she paid for a call with Justin, Jenny has made that money back and much more thanks to his advice.

“It's about investing in yourself in the areas that actually matter. For example, people say they're investing in themselves, so they're going to pay $3,000 for a vacation because they're going to make a video off of it. That's not a good investment, because the return isn’tgreat,” she says.

Compare that to an investment that actually furthers your business and opens up your ability to make revenue…the choice is obvious.

Going full time

Jenny still has a year left to finish her bachelor’s degree, but she plans to dedicate herself full-time to content creation after she graduates. And thanks to what she’s learned from Creator Wizard, she knows she can run a business that supports herself.

These days, about 25% of Jenny’s revenue comes from YouTube itself, with another 65% from brand deals, and 10% from consulting.

**That diversity in her business shows that Jenny has built a solid foundation and with what she knows now (thanks to Creator Wizard!), her dream of creating full-time is within reach.**

Learn more about how Creator Wizard can help you here.