The Collaboration Ladder
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Caspar Lee's growth on YouTube was not driven by better videos but by systematically borrowing other people's audiences. After his channel was banned for click fraud, he restarted from zero and decided that collaboration would be the engine. He targeted creators one rung above him rather than the biggest names, put himself physically in front of them (queueing behind them on YouNow, then flying to the UK at 17), and turned each collaboration into an introduction to that person's friends. Ten collaborations in one trip took him from roughly 5,000 to 100,000 subscribers. The rule he draws from it is to climb the ladder rung by rung as leverage compounds, rather than pitching the biggest name on day one.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Be willing to restart from zero
Treat a dead or mis-positioned channel, product or account as sunk learning rather than sunk cost. Caspar's third channel only worked because the first two taught him what the format and the audience actually were.
Pro tip Carry forward the lessons, not the assets. He describes each restart as the point where he understood a bit more about how the platform worked.
- 2
Target the rung above you, not the top
Identify creators or operators who are one visible step ahead of where you are, not the household names. When Caspar started, his heroes had around 10,000 subscribers, which made the ask realistic.
Watch out Pitching the biggest name first wastes the one shot you get. His explicit advice is not to reach out to Elon Musk on day one.
- 3
Put yourself where they already are
Find the venue where those people already spend attention and show up in it repeatedly. He used YouNow, an open-mic style live stream where you could queue up and broadcast directly after the creators you admired.
Pro tip Say plainly what you want: he went live after them, said how much he loved their work, and said he would love to make videos with them.
- 4
Make the trip and stack the meetings
Convert online contact into physical presence and compress many collaborations into one window. He convinced his mother to let him fly to the UK at 17 to meet people he had met on the internet, giving up a school hockey tour to do it.
Watch out This is a real bet with a real cost. Everyone at his school thought he was crazy for skipping the tour.
- 5
Meet their friends, not just them
Treat every collaboration as an introduction to that person's network rather than a one-off video. Caspar describes his core skill as meeting people, then meeting their friends, then collaborating with those friends too.
Pro tip One trip produced collaborations with roughly ten creators because each one opened the next.
- 6
Cash the new leverage and climb again
Once the collaborations move your numbers, the next tier of people becomes reachable. He could not get anyone at 20 subscribers, could work with peers at 10,000, and eventually reached celebrities like Ed Sheeran.
Watch out The compounding is invisible from outside. People assume you arrived overnight when there were years of work behind it.
- 7
Make your value legible to everyone you meet
State clearly and without bragging what you bring, so people know what to come to you for. Caspar's stated angle is a creator who understands business, and he repeats it so that when an opportunity arises people think of him.
Pro tip Meet people even when there is nothing in it now. He argues that only giving time to people you can extract from today is short-term and, long term, stupid.
In the wild
At 17, still at school in South Africa, Caspar had around 5,000 subscribers and a set of UK YouTube heroes he had only spoken to on YouNow. He gave up a hockey tour, persuaded his mother to let him fly to Britain to meet people from the internet, and was picked up by Marcus Butler. Over the trip he met each creator, then their friends, and filmed collaborations with roughly ten of them. He went home with a subscriber count that had jumped to six figures, finished school, and decided to skip university and go full time.
→ Roughly 5,000 to 100,000 subscribers off a single collaboration trip, and the confidence to turn down university.
Caspar could not convince anyone to collaborate when he had 20 subscribers, and could not reach 10,000-subscriber creators either. Once he was at 10,000 himself, those collaborations opened up, and each tier unlocked the next. Within a few years the same ladder logic carried him to interviewing musicians and actors, with the high point being Ed Sheeran in his bathroom at a time when mainstream celebrities did not take YouTube seriously. He frames the whole arc as leverage accumulating slowly rather than a breakthrough moment.
→ Access to celebrity guests at a time when traditional talent still ignored YouTube.
Common mistakes
Pitching the top of the ladder first
Reaching out to the biggest possible name on day one almost always fails and burns the relationship. Caspar's rule is to build up slowly with people who are doing things now, because leverage accumulates and the big names become reachable later.
Treating a failed start as a reason to stop
His partnership was killed when a classmate spam-clicked his ads, forcing a third channel from scratch. That restart is where the growth actually began, and he now says never be scared to restart something.
Only meeting people who are useful today
Filtering every meeting by immediate return kills the friend-of-a-friend mechanism the ladder depends on. He argues you never know where people end up, so meet as many as you can and leave them with a good experience.
From the transcript
“the secret was going to be collaborating and so I started collaborating and I think it just worked”
“do well which is I'm able to kind of meet people and then meet their friends and then collaborate with people and and I built…”
“what I recommend is just really collaborate with as many people as you can and don't just say on day one I'm gonna reach out…”
From the episode
Caspar Lee: How He Built A 10+ Million YouTube Following In His 20s (And Why He Quit)
Caspar Lee