Mr Beast on Joe Rogan (creator economy)

Podcasts · Business, Media

Started when he was 11, biggest YouTuber now that he is 23. Put a decade of work into it

Very little revenue until he was 18 (around $200/month). Most revenue started to happen afterwards. Compounding works, but it was a very slow burn at the start

First video was about a stupid game that he was playing called Battle Pirates and it weirdly got 20k views ⇒ that got him hooked

Was super obsessed with the micro things in the videos. The pacing, the editing, how the thumbnail worked, color etc. Everything

Found 3 other people who were in the same spot as him (10-20k subscribers) and they would just obsessively share notes every day on a Skype call for a 1000 days in a row. Obsessively studied what makes a good video, what makes a good thumbnail, what’s good pacing, how to go viral. They would call this a “data mastermind” session

Would do crazy minute things, like taking a thousand thumbnails and seeing if the brightness of a thumbnail correlated with interesting metrics. Or in a bunch of videos with over 10M views, how often did they cut the camera angle

Had millions of subscribers by the time they finished this

Working with people helps you grow exponentially quicker. If you make 2 mistakes per week and learn from them, imagine working with 4 other people. Combined, you would make 10 mistakes per week and you could all learn together at a really rapid pace

Now doing hard-dub channels. Hires voice actors to dub the videos in multiple languages (Spanish, Portugese, others) — seeing massive growth because of that

Process to make sure it’s right: first, get someone to write a transcript. Then get two other people to write more transcripts and see if they all add up

Tries to get really famous voice actors to do voice dubs now. For example, the guy that does voice dubs in Spanish is the same guy who did voice dubs for Spiderman movies

Invests most of his money back in content. For example – the Squid Games video cost $4M! Did crazy things, like getting the cash, developing custom hardware and custom apps for “shooting” the people when they were out, building engineered structures like the glass bridge etc!

They also did a video where they literally bought an island in the Bahamas, fixed it up with imported sand, and then gifted it to the winner of a contest they started

Invests in a casting team for many of the videos, so he doesn’t get people who freeze in front of the camera

For some things (like Squid Game) you have to strike when it’s hot!

You have to continuously innovate. If all you do is do cookie cutter things for years on end, you’ll become irrelevant really fast (even if they go well at first)

Finding talent to work with: find open-minded people with a good work ethic and train them up and who can think for themselves. No one specializes in this kind of content

Super super important to generate a bunch of ideas and then whittle down from there. Just write down a hundred ideas in 30 minutes without any judgement on them whatsoever. Most of them will be horrible and stupid. That’s okay. Even if you get one good idea out of them, it’s awesome. He literally has 1000+ ideas on a google doc right now

Can make side businesses grow really fast as a result of your reach. For example, Mr Beast Burgers (more on that below) has more than $100M in topline revenue for restaurants after just 15 months of existence

Mr Beast on Clubhouse: Creating great videos

Now working on chocolate bars!

Feastables - Feast Like A Beast

Also building dub studios across the world, in order to help other people dub their videos

It’s much easier to get 5M views on 1 video, than 100k views on 50 videos. Put more wood behind fewer arrows