I was out in Vegas at DigiMarCon with my team, Dylan Haugen and Jack Wendt, and we ran an Office Hours session for founders building software for the trades. The room was full of people selling into HVAC, roofing, fence, plumbing, and gutter shops, and most of them were burning cash on Meta ads to acquire customers.
We pulled apart a YouTube channel called HVAC Quote, looked at fresh analytics on a brand-new channel run by another founder in the room, and let ChatGPT loose in agent mode to rewrite video titles live inside YouTube Studio.
This is for you if you run a vertical SaaS or AI product that sells into a home-service category. The Goal is simple: get a qualified buyer (an HVAC owner, a roofer, a plumber) to watch your video, trust you, and book a demo or sign up. Cost per view under a dime, retention above 70 percent at 10 seconds, and demo bookings inside two weeks.
What HVAC Quote Is Actually Doing for Marko
Marko Sipilä runs HVAC Quote, an AI quoting tool for HVAC contractors. He is not an HVAC owner. He is a software founder whose entire customer list is HVAC owners, and his channel is built around that one buyer.
His numbers caught my attention. He drove 100 customers in 100 days off a brand-new channel by pointing Facebook ads at his YouTube videos. One video, “HVAC Companies: Stop Hiding Your Prices,” held viewers for an average of 3 minutes on a 7-minute runtime, and that retention is what made the boost economics work. The title pulls in the exact buyer he wants on a sales call. The body of the video confirms he understands their problem better than they do.
I asked George Paladichuk, who was in the session, why he thought HVAC owners were actually staying for those videos. His words: “They’re HVAC businesses, and they’re staying because it’s, it’s relevant to them. You’re speaking directly to an issue that they know they have.”
Industry average cost-per-view on YouTube ads sits between $0.10 and $0.30 per Wyzowl’s 2026 guide. Marko is paying close to a penny a view because the title screens out everyone who is not an HVAC owner before the click ever happens. Targeting does not have to be fancy when the headline does the targeting for you.
George’s NaiL AI Channel and the ChatGPT Agent Mode Walkthrough
George runs NaiL AI, a missed-call answering tool for local service businesses. His ICP is roofers, fence companies, and other trades that lose money every time the phone rings and nobody picks up.
His channel had four videos up when we started. I told him to dictate a prompt to ChatGPT while sharing his screen: “I’m on my YouTube channel here, and it’s a brand new channel. Go through my analytics, the content itself, the descriptions, titles, and give me ideas to improve based on the data.”
ChatGPT came back with concrete edits. It rewrote “Most Roofers Are Still Wasting Thousands on Missed Calls” into “Why 75% of Roofers Still Waste Thousands on Missed Calls,” because the specific number creates curiosity that the original headline missed. It reorganized his playlists into actual categories, added a website link to every description, and pushed him toward the 5-to-10-minute range instead of going longer. Then it switched into agent mode and started making the changes directly inside YouTube Studio while we watched.
Why 88 Views Beats 8,800
We pulled up George’s analytics live. The headline numbers were small: 119 views in 28 days, 7.3 watch hours, one new subscriber. Individual videos like “How This Fence Company Saved $75K” had 88 views. “I Built a Roofing Website in 20 Minutes” had 21.
I told George those numbers are healthy for a brand-new channel selling into a niche vertical. A roofing company owner who watches an entire video about saving $75K is a qualified pipeline lead, and 88 of those is worth more than 8,800 random impressions from a broad-targeted Meta campaign. The dollar-a-day approach works precisely because you are paying for distribution to people who already care about the topic, and a few of them will book.
Fixing the First 10 Seconds
We spent real time on intros, because that is where most founder videos lose the audience. I showed George how to trim the dead time off the front of a video directly in YouTube Studio, no Premiere, no CapCut.
His takeaway, in his own words: “If you don’t keep them there in the first 10 seconds, it doesn’t matter what happens after that. And if you’re not maintaining 70% of the people after 10 seconds, you need to change your intro.” That 70 percent number is the metric to put on your dashboard. If the videos you and your team are filming cannot clear it, the title is wrong, the opening line is wrong, or both.
Then he admitted something a lot of founders in the room related to:
George: “I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is, is done is better than perfect. That’s, that’s what’s been holding me back the whole time.”
Me: “Yeah, exactly. And look, you got four videos up. How long did that take you?”
George: “Like, honestly, once I just stopped overthinking it, like a few days.”
Raw phone footage, straight to YouTube, no fancy editing. That is how he got the first four up.
Booking Podcast Guests with One LinkedIn DM
George also shared that he had booked five podcast episodes by sending plain LinkedIn DMs. He reached out to people like Chris Lee, who had a nine-figure exit in roofing, and Tim Brown of Hook Agency. His message was short: “I just reached out saying, hey, I’m starting up this show and want some reputable folks to help me out.”
Every single person said yes. For a vertical SaaS founder, one podcast relationship with a credible operator inside your category is worth more than a month of cold outbound, because it builds domain authority and gives you a co-created asset to repurpose for the next year. You record once, then cut clips for YouTube, LinkedIn, and your sales follow-up emails.
Sinead from Ireland and What’s Open Internationally
Sinead joined the call from Ireland and asked whether founders outside the U.S. could access what we run. The honest answer has two parts.
The AI Apprentice Program at High Rise Influence is U.S.-only by design, because the apprentices work on real local-service clients in U.S. categories. The BlitzMetrics courses, the Content Factory training, and the Office Hours sessions are open internationally, and we have founders in the group running this same film-and-repurpose playbook out of Dublin, London, and Sydney. If you are outside the U.S. and selling software into the trades, that is the lane to start in.
What to Do This Week If You Are a Vertical SaaS Founder
The pattern across Marko, George, and the other founders in the session is the same. They film themselves on a phone talking about the one problem their product solves, they let AI clean up titles and descriptions, and they put a small daily budget behind the videos that hold viewers past the 10-second mark.
Track three numbers in your first two weeks. Cost per view should land under $0.10, retention at 10 seconds should clear 70 percent, and you should see at least one demo booking or trial signup attributable to the videos before you decide whether the channel is working. If any one of those three is off, the fix is almost always the title or the opening line, not the budget.
If you want help running this playbook on your own channel, book a 15-minute call with the team at High Rise Influence. If you are international or earlier-stage, start with the BlitzMetrics courses and join Office Hours.