MrBeast's Keys to Success in Business
I watched every interview MrBeast has done. The following are my key takeaways and notes from each interview.
Key Takeaways
- Focus fully on making the best videos possible. (Fully focus on your passion.)
- Continually learn from videos, podcasts, talking to people, and books.
- Work 14 hours a day.
- Reinvest all the money you make into making better videos. (Reinvest all the money you make into your business.)
- For educational YouTubers: Study the big 10+ million subscriber explainer accounts like Ted-Ed.
- Align yourself with a moral cause. Give to charity. Always appear saintly.
- Do giveaways.
- Make a Dream 100 list to network and get ideas.
- Always learn from up-and-coming talent. Call them on the phone and figure out their keys to success.
- YouTube success is the key to business success.
- Delegate everything non-essential.
- Think of ideas every day. Spend an hour coming up with ideas.
- Only the best videos get posted. If a video isn’t good enough, scrap the whole video.
- Keep editing the video until it is perfect (even if it takes 12 edits).
- Watch through your video and if there’s any part where you’re even slightly bored, cut the clip.
- Your team/friends need to critique everything you do. Your work could always be better and you need to constantly improve.
- YouTube is the best growth platform. It comes pre-installed on android devices. Only use another platform if you are early and it's trending (like TikTok in 2019).
- You need to get to 70% view retention.
- Reply to every comment.
- Find people who have the same passion as you.
- Go on hour-long walks where you call someone from your contacts to catch up, pick their brain, and think of ideas.
- Hire a video editor or animator early on.
Notes:
Always reinvest what you make back into the business.
Reply to every comment.
Find people who have the same passion as you. Learn from everyone’s mistakes.
Hire an editor and teach them how to do your style.
He records multiple videos at one time. Each one typically takes up an entire warehouse.
Start small and work your way up. Start with 1 employee. Start with a small office space. Start with a small warehouse.
Jimmy spends all of the money he makes on YouTube. Ever since he was 15. If you start losing too much money, just spend less on your next video or project.
Just keep slowly growing. Jimmy hires about a person a month.
The first 10 seconds of the video are extremely important. You have to make it a hook and set the stage for what’s coming. You also want to make sure that you prove that your clickbait thumbnail and title will actually be in the video.
Never put out a video that doesn’t have a first minute that would hook you.
Your team/friends need to critique everything you do. Your work could always be better and you need to constantly improve.
Have a perfect video checklist. What do all of the best videos have? Need to analyze MrBeast and other top creators.
- Analyze the first minute of this video: https://youtu.be/hxwpkM5w3Cc
He said that 2 years ago they figured out what they were going to film the week before shooting. Now, there are multi-month planned videos.
Introduce side stories to make it more interesting. Have multiple people doing different things and weave the stories together.
You need to get to 70% view retention.
Visuals can make it more interesting.
If you have a good personality and you’re passionate, you’ll probably get views.
The MrBeast gaming and reacts channels are just cash flow that he invests into the main channel. Everything Jimmy does is to get more money to invest into the main channel.
People with 1-7 million subs still have no idea what they’re doing. They’ll hire anyone. They usually have no business knowledge.
Jimmy’s employee said that Jimmy told them every week that they would be the biggest YouTube channel in the world.
He would only think about video ideas and YouTube. He would think about video ideas while he slept. If he had an idea in a dream he’d wake up and write it down.
Use the dictionary to get ideas. Let’s say you open it up and it lands on flowers. Then you think: I gave my girlfriend 100,000 flowers on vday.
Jimmy’s main channel videos cost around 500,000 each.
MrBeast has run out of money and needed a loan to keep going.
His guiding principle is to make the best videos possible.
- Hook, story, investing in the video, giveaways.
Jimmy wants to talk to up and coming YouTubers to learn from them. But they’re hard to find. He says he wants a list of the top 100 who just reached a million and are obsessed with YouTube.
Scene changes. Introduction of new information every ~6 seconds. A twist in the first minute. Drone shot in the first 4 seconds. You need to have this much stuff happen in the beginning of every video.
- Maybe you need to cut to multiple people who will be in the video and some of their best clips right in the beginning. For an interview podcast.
- Evan Carmichael videos where you clip the best video ideas of other famous people could be huge.
*Watch through your video and if there’s any part where you’re even slightly bored, cut the clip.
*If a video isn’t good enough, scrap the whole video. Only the best videos get published.
Some videos get edited more than 12 times to try to make it perfect.
Jimmy contacted a dream 1000 list of influencers to launch a video all on the same day for his TeamTrees event. He tried to see if he had any friends or contacts that had a contact to each influencer.
Always gamify charity. TeamTrees had a leaderboard for people who donated. Elon Musk donated $1 mil and he was at the top until Tobi Lutke donate $1 mil and 1 dollar.
*Align yourself with a moral cause. Give to charity. Always appear saintly.
Don’t start too many side projects. Focus fully on your one main thing.
***Study the big 10+ million subscriber explainer accounts like Ted Ed. That’s the key to educational videos.
He doesn’t promote merch every video because it could hurt retention. He makes a fraction of what he could make on merch because his only focus is to get people hooked on the videos.
Jimmy goes on hour-long walks where he calls someone from his contacts to catch up, pick their brain, and think of ideas.
Always be learning, reinvesting every dollar, and working 10-12 hours a day.
Jimmy doesn’t have a clear “why”. He says youtube just allows him to have freedom, be famous, have money, etc. It is a vehicle that lets him be what he wants.
Minimize regret.
This Joe Rogan interview is Jimmy’s best interview.
Jimmy’s first YouTube video at age 11 got 20,000 views. He was hooked ever since. Early success. A taste of validation early on made him obsessed with YouTube.
When Jimmy got into his group of 4 people who all analyzed how YouTube works down to thumbnail brightness, they all got to 1+ million subscribers in months.
Only 10% of the world speaks english, so 90% of the world can’t watch your videos. That’s why you dub everything into the top 10 global languages.
They get celebrities in their native country to do the voiceovers. Viewers will recognize the voice of brazilian Spiderman, for instance.
***The difference between a 1 million view video and a 30 million view video is the idea. The idea is super important.
- Jimmy would spend an hour every day brainstorming ideas. This is like 10X James Altucher’s idea machine idea.
- The best way is probably to watch other videos for inspiration and then see what pops in your head.
- For education video, read books and see what topics are the most practical, useful, or interesting.
***YouTube is the best growth platform. It comes pre-installed on android devices. Only use another platform if you are early and it is trending (like TikTok in 2019).
Jimmy does multiple takes for his video intros and when he has to say lines. He also turns on his YouTuber persona for the camera. He’s pretty reserved normally.
*The cash is just for show, he wires the winners the real money.
*Jimmy has a list of 1000 video ideas that has probably 200 insane viral video ideas. So you can invest your time into ideas early on and then reap the rewards later.
MrBeast’s TikTok feed was mostly gym and finance stuff but he was spending 2 hours a day on it so he uninstalled it.
You cannot be on social media other than from 10 am to 6 pm in China.
***YouTube IS business. Restaurants are extremely competitive. Winning entails getting paper thin margins. MrBeast was able to have a huge restaurant instantly because of his brand and outreach. If you want to win at business, make a huge YouTube brand. Mr Beast has no knowledge of the restaurant business, he partnered with someone who already had 300 restaurants. They contacted MrBeast to do the deal. Blow up on YouTube and opportunities will come to you.
***Mr Beast said that ideally, he’d just spend all of his time filming content, because it is the one part that cannot be delegated. He films for his gaming channel on Mondays. He films for his reacts channel and philanthropy channel on Tuesdays. Wednesday to Friday he films for the main channel. On Saturday he works on all of his side businesses: Beast Burger, Feastables, and merch. On Sunday he tries not to work.
He uses his other channels and businesses to make money because the main channel is not profitable.
*MrBeast said that he sees YouTube as his first business, like Elon’s PayPal. And when he’s 30 he might move on to his “Tesla” or “SpaceX”.
***Jimmy has Crohn’s disease. He often has low energy. Despite that, he is able to do amazing things. You have to just execute and work no matter what.
YouTube gives you money, influence, and fame. It gives you everything that people want.
Rogan said that his podcast was losing money for the first ~5 years. MrBeast said he made videos while making no money for years too.
*Knowledge leverage: get mentors. MrBeast didn’t have mentors because there aren’t any in such a new industry. Casey Neistat did have a mentor—Roman Atwood. Then Casey mentored other YouTubers.
You actually don’t want to script your videos for entertainment content. You want it to feel fun and natural. Always script education content.
Whoever is the head (founder, channel owner, CEO) sets the tone. The channel or company is really a refection of them.
Find something you truly love otherwise you’ll quit before you reach success.
Mr Beast uses TikTok to test video ideas.
Jimmy said everything changed for him when he found people who were obsessed with YouTube too. You need to find a group who are around the same level to grow together.
An interview with MrBeast’s manager. This is the guy who was behind the camera in the Nadeshot/100 Thieves MrBeast interview telling Jimmy what he could and couldn’t say.
He says that if you want to get into YouTube management, find a YouTuber that you love who has 100k subs and see if you guys hit it off. You are essentially betting on them to see if they become the next biggest YouTuber.
Don’t pitch people on what you can do for them. Just meet up or get on FaceTime and see if you hit it off. That’s the best relationship for a manager to have.
You typically get a % of every deal you get for the creator. But you do some things just to provide value to the creator (for free). This guy said that he took the time to find Jimmy an island in the Bahamas for free because you never say no to a creator that you want a long relationship with.
Everything you do should seem grand. Make it a spectacle. MrBeast didn’t just open one Beast burger store, he opened 300 overnight. It has to be a big story for the news to spread.
*Try filming fewer videos per week but increasing the quality. See if overall views goes up.
When you make a big change, commit to it for 4 months before your decide if it works or not. Like changing how many videos you make per week. Or starting a second channel.
When you start a second channel, you want it to appeal to your main audience. This allows you to get more early views.