How Nakodo finds creators who fit

A campaign starts from your website address. Nakodo reads your homepage and up to 5 key pages it finds there, such as about, products, pricing, features, FAQ and shipping, and writes a brief from them:

• What you sell, in a sentence or two.
• Where your customers are: the countries and languages to look in.
• The creator who fits: the kind of content, and a subscriber range.
• Search keywords: 3 to 6 groups, 10 to 20 keywords in all, written the way people search YouTube rather than the way you describe your product.
• Words that mark a video as off-topic, so a channel that mostly makes something else can be set aside.

You can change any of it before the search runs. The brief is where most of the quality comes from: keywords taken from your own site find creators who talk about your kind of product, not just your general niche. Our guide to writing a creator brief covers the different brief you send to creators.

Nakodo searches YouTube for each keyword through YouTube's official API, looking at videos published in the last 12 months, and gathers the channels behind them. A channel found by several keywords is one channel with several matches, which counts in its favour later.

Each channel's details and up to 20 recent uploads are then fetched. Channels that can't be a fit are set aside before scoring, with the reason recorded:

• Marked as made for kids.
• Fewer than half the subscribers at the bottom of your range, or more than twice the top of it.
• No uploads in the last 6 months.
• More than half of recent video titles contain the brief's off-topic words.

Every remaining channel is scored from 0 to 100. The score has five parts, each worked out from fixed thresholds on that channel's own numbers. Channels are never ranked against each other, so a score means the same thing in every campaign. Creators scoring 55 or more count as a fit and get written notes on why.

Engagement uses videos at least 3 days old, because views on newer ones are still climbing, and prefers long-form videos over Shorts (anything up to 3 minutes), because the two behave differently. Engagement rate is (likes + comments) / views; the engagement rate guide explains why per view beats per subscriber.

Engagement rate points

1% gives 30, 3% gives 60, 6% gives 90, 10% gives 100 or more, on straight lines in between.

Views per subscriber points

2% gives 25, 10% gives 65, 30% gives 100 or more, on straight lines in between.

These thresholds are Nakodo's own, chosen to separate active audiences from inactive ones. They are not an industry benchmark. You can try them on any channel with the engagement rate calculator.

For comment quality, Nakodo samples up to 20 comments from each of 3 recent videos and sorts each into question, discussion, praise, spam or self-promotion. Only the counts are kept, never the comments or who wrote them. When there are fewer than 10 comments to judge, the part is left out and the other four are reweighted, rather than guessed.

Every score comes with its reasons in plain sentences, such as "7 of 12 recent videos match the brief's topics" or "A typical video gets 41K views, 12% of subscribers", and with flags for anything worth a second look:

• Shorts-heavy: more than 60% of recent uploads are Shorts.
• Subscribers hidden: the channel hides its subscriber count, so size is scored as unknown.
• Outside your markets: the channel's country is not one of yours.
• Comments off, or few comments: too little to judge the audience by.

Nakodo looks only for the business email creators publish. It reads the channel description and recent video descriptions, then follows the website and link-in-bio links the creator publishes: up to 3 starting pages, and from each up to 2 pages whose address suggests contact, about, work with me, collaborations, business, press, media kit, partnerships, sponsorship or booking.

• It respects each site's robots.txt.
• It undoes the usual "[at]" and "[dot]" spellings, and skips no-reply and placeholder addresses.
• Every address is stored with where it was found and when it was checked, and is checked again after 30 days.
• It never gets around YouTube's captcha on "View email address", never logs in as anyone and never guesses an address. When a creator publishes no email, it says so, and that creator is never contacted.

Creators' addresses are never shown, sold or exported to you. You get a creator's address only when they agree to talk and Nakodo introduces you. The guide to finding a YouTuber's email shows how to do the same search by hand.

Nakodo emails creators on your behalf. Each conversation has its own address on Nakodo's sending domain, with your name as the sender, such as "Sam from Acme", so replies come back to Nakodo and are matched to the right brand and creator. For each campaign you choose who is contacted: only the creators you pick, everyone you shortlist, or every creator that fits.

You set the offer and the ask for each campaign and your signature once. Each first email is written for one creator and follows the same rules:

• It mentions one specific recent video by title, in the first two sentences.
• It states your offer and ask exactly as you wrote them, and never invents payment amounts, discount codes, deadlines or product details.
• It runs 80 to 140 words, with a subject under 60 characters.
• It ends with a line saying that if it's not a fit, the creator can say so and you won't follow up.

First emails wait for your approval by default. You can instead let them go out on their own after an hour, during which you can still read, edit or stop each one. Emails go out on weekdays between 9am and 5pm in the creator's time zone, paced rather than sent in bulk.

If there's no reply, Nakodo follows up in the same conversation: twice by default and up to three times, 4, 7 and 10 days after the email before. Follow-ups run 40 to 80 words, keep the same offer and never say "just following up".

When a creator replies, Nakodo reads it and answers the questions it can from your offer, ask and notes. Anything it can't answer, such as rates, contracts or anything unclear, comes to you, and your answer goes out in the same conversation. An out-of-office reply pushes the follow-ups back. If the creator points to another address, such as their manager's, Nakodo writes there.

When a creator says yes, Nakodo introduces you by email with your own address in copy, then steps out, and you agree the details directly from your own inbox. Every email has a one-click way to stop. A creator who opts out, or whose address bounces or reports spam, is never emailed again by any brand through Nakodo. See the outreach email templates for messages you can adapt by hand.

YouTube data is refreshed after 25 days and deleted within 30 if it isn't, as YouTube's API terms require. Comment analysis keeps counts only. Contact details are stored with where they were found. Creators can ask for their channel to be removed at any time; the privacy notice has the details.