I spent The Last 3 Days Studying Mr. Beast

Understandng Jimmy’s success will transform your approach to content creation

Here is what I learned from devouring every Mr. Beast interview I could find.

Jimmy “Mr. Beast” Donaldson at only 24 years old operates multiple YouTube channels with a total of more than 180 million subscribers and just recently breached the 100 million subscriber milestone on his main channel.

He also founded multiple side businesses along the way, including a delivery-only fast-food restaurant chain (Beast Burger) with over 1,000 locations across North America and Europe, with plans to expand to more countries and “increase the number of locations exponentially”.

Jimmy threw ten consecutive years of his life into one single purpose. That is making the best videos he can make and having them go as viral as possible.

Few have as firm of a grasp on how to attract massive attention online and maintain it as Mr. Beast.

His audience retention rate on YouTube is 70% according to Tim Denning. This is crazy high. In my eyes that alone made him an excellent candidate to investigate and learn from.

In his interviews he tells the wild story of what got him to where he is today with all the bumps on the road and health related difficulties coming from a chronic auto-immune illness he had to overcome.

Ever since he made his first sponsored viral video of himself giving a homeless man 10.000 dollars he's grown more and more engaged with philanthropy and even went through with having 20.000.000 trees planted to celebrate hitting 20M subscribers.

Damn. What a guy.

His beginnings were very much humble

»I was as awkward as they came, no money no nothing, and I just obsessed over youtube every day for a decade.« — Jimmy Donaldson

His obsession began way back when he was an eleven years old kid who got lucky with his first video which randomly got 20K views. This chance event, he said, had hooked him on making videos for life.

At first he was using his brother’s old laptop to film them, had terrible acne and his voice sounded bad. Super anxious as he was and with nothing else other than YouTube as a topic he couldn’t even talk to anyone in school.

Not that he didn’t want to, he simply couldn’t talk about anything else other than YouTube because he didn’t know how, he was so obsessed. YouTube wasn’t “cool” back then and so he didn’t have any friends. And still he was getting no views.

Despite this, his seemingly completely irrational optimism never waned.

The first few years he wasn't making any money either. Then he eventually started making about a dollar a day and was frantically saving up for basic equipment like the microphone and a computer, starting the trend of religiously reinvesting everything back into YouTube.

»When I first started, the videos were horrible, then they slowly got less and less horrible throughout the years.«

He's still reinvesting everything back into his videos. Except now it’s millions, not pennies.

On top of it all, he got Crohn’s disease, which is chronic and has no cure. It makes him fatigued often. The way it works is that his immune system attacks itself and prevents the digestive tract from processing and absorbing food at all and causes diarrhea.

To combat this, he has to take medication that suppresses his immune system sometimes, making him fall sick more easily. The inflammation was really bad.

»It’s like someones just dragging a knife across your stomach. It was super painful.«

When it first hit him he was 15, and it was terrible. Months of suffering and losing weight went by before the treatment plan was assembled, months passed with no energy to do anything.

Two things he had going for him from the start

His superhuman resilience and determination.

In 2015 he made a video addressing himself 5 years from then and promptly uploaded it in 2020, a video of him just repeatedly stating he hopes that by then he will have gotten 1 million subscribers…

Two years later he counted to 100.000 in one sitting for a single video. Talk about hustle!

After five years when the video was finally released, his subscriber count was at 40.000.000, 40 times as many as he had hoped.

But let’s go back a little bit.

Even at 18 there was still very little money coming in from his efforts.

Already he was obsessing about everything YouTube. How to edit and pace, what went viral and ultimately how to crack the code of popularity. He called only watching and studying YouTube videos at the expense of everything else his “information diet”.

The results weren’t quite there yet though. He needed to take it to another level first.

The fanatical mastermind was a game-changer

Turning point came when he graduated from high-school and his mom gave him an ultimatum.

Either he was to move out or do community college. Bugrudgingly he agreed to go to college even though he hated school with a passion, all because he didn’t yet have enough money to go on his own.

»That made me hate life, I was borderline suicidal.«

So he would act like he was going to cummunity college, but was instead working on his videos in a car and editing them. He knew he was screwed if this didn’t work.

Most of his growth came after this low point. He found four »lunatics« like himself, three of whom were college dropouts and they would talk every day in group calls for 1000 days in a row and did nothing else but hyper-study what makes a good video, what makes a good thumbnail.

How to go viral.

They called them daily masterminds. Some days he would go into the call at 7. A. M. and get off at 10 P.M. and go directly to bed, then wake up and do it again.

They approached success in YouTube scientifically, such as looking at thousands of thumbnails to see if there is any correlation between the shade of the colors and virality etc.

They would micro-analyze everything and look for replicable ways of succeeding in every metric.

»That’s where most of my knowledge came from. I just surrounded myself with these lunatics… We had no life.«

When they first met they all had about ten thousand subscribers and by the time they stopped talking all of them had millions. And they all hit a million subs about a month in.

They were all absolutely religious about it and learning very fast from their own mistakes as well as from the mistakes the others in the group were making, which compounded fast and made their growth skyrocket exponentially as they figured out how the system works and how to crack it.

“they say it takes 10.000 hours to master something. We did more than 40.000”.

His lessons can 10X your success as a content creator

Jimmy proved this by coaching multiple YouTubers, whose names he didn’t want to disclose in the interviews so as not to compromise their achievement in the eyes of the public.

»If you knew what I know about how to make a good video and go viral, even if you had zero subscribers you could be making 100K per month in half a year.«

He claims his clients soon after his coaching started consistently started getting tens of millions of views…

Before.

After.

The guiding principle is always the same, he says. Make the best videos possible. This is a recurring theme in most interviews he did.

I believe this advice applies not just to YouTube, but to other platforms looking at similar metrics for virality as well, Medium being one of them.

Make your content great, even if it takes longer to do.

This is the logic behind his philosophy of success…

1. According to Mr. Beast, only 3 things matter for virality

• Click-through rate
• Retention rate
• Viewer satisfaction

People have to click on your stuff.

Then you have to keep their attention engaged until the end.

Finally they’ll come back for more if they loved what you did.

2. Hooking the audience immediately is key

When making videos, obviously the thumbnail, but also the beginning and first minute of a video are very important to him. He spends a lot of time optimizing these things to make sure they hook the audience.

This is crucial, because as he explains it, the first impressions have a massive impact on the performance of the entire piece. In his mind it’s worth it to go the extra mile and put in ten or more additional hours to polish and add small details and sections in critical places throughout the video for extra retention.

So much thought and effort is put into these things that people would be stupid not to watch the videos.

3. Don’t be fooled, ideas are extremely important

It seems popular nowadays to minimize the importance of ideas and attribute everything to execution, at least on this platoform. Jimmy holds the polar opposite opinion.

Mr. Beast says that ideas are so important that »most YouTubers could pull triple the views with half the work«, if they just had better ideas.

He used to spend an hour a day just brainstorming new ideas, one of his methods was to browse through the dictionary and brainstorm off of random words. He even tried lucid dreaming to try and get new ideas while sleeping.

According to his estimates he’d spent at least 10.000 hours of his life just brainatorming ideas.

Again and again it’s stressed that your side projects can’t distract you from the main focus, which for him is making the best video he can make.

He’s ruthlessly perfectionistic. If a video doesn’t live up to his high standards, even if he’d spent a million dollars on it he’ll kill it without a second thought.

His approach is based on quality over quantity. He says it’s easier to make one viral video than 100 mediocre ones, because the higher quality brings in exponentially more people with the algorithm working in your favor. This is his advice to YouTubers:

“Just put in way more effort, because you won’t get triple the views, but 10x more views”.

Really this advice applies to most of the internet, not just YouTube. But again, the effort is only as valuable as your knowledge of what will actually work.

Many of us give up on putting in the effort when our results clearly don’t match it, and that’s normal.

The answer is not to quit though, but to study the game and experiment in order to get the knowledge needed for the work to pay off. The effort stays the same, but as your skills, knowledge and reputation increase, so will your results.

You can be sure of your success not when you achieve it, but when you can consistently replicate it. If we focus on making better content, eventually the numbers will follow.

So long as one doesn’t quit.

Ok. What now? To the moon (not literally… At least not yet…)

Even after having become one of the top YouTubers, Mr. Beast continues to reinvest everything into his videos, hiring more people and doing crazier and crazier things.

Jimmy keeps pushing the envelope, even hiring crews from other countries to make exact copies of his videos except in their language to access the non-english speaking demographic.

He bought multiple studios and a giant 10.000.000 dollar warehouse to be able to film multiple videos in at once, because his videos usually take a long time to do, so he has to work on multiple at one time.

Chose philanthropy over luxury

He confessed he did have to buy a nicer house for security reasons, because someone broke into his old 350 dollar- a-month shared home and stole everything.

But other than that, he refuses to indulge in a luxurious lifestyle entirely, focusing his resources on helping people instead. Personally I’ve nothing against luxury, but giving seems to make Jimmy happy, which is amazing.

Mr. Beast’s obsession is a double-edged sword

The infectious enthusiasm for the idea of being the best YouTuber works wonders to inspire his team.

“He would tell us we would be the biggest in the world every week” - Tareq, his cameraman.

But there is a dark side to this kind of possessed state of being too.

When asked what he did for fun he said he wants to talk to more YouTubers to learn from…

The price for this kind of laser-like focus also turns out to be accepting being out of the loop in most things that have nothing to do with your work.

This is dead giveaway, especially in his podcast with Joe Rogan, who likes to have deep conversations about all sorts of popular and weird topics and Jimmy didn’t even know about half of what Joe was talking about. Then again, neither did I haha.

No finish line in sight

Finally, his obsession runs so deep he says he has no social life and gets depressed if he stops working. So he needs to keep himself from burning out at all costs…

The solution which so far seems to be working is to outsource whatever he doesn’t enjoy doing.

I’m very curious where his ambition’ll take him in the future, but until then he’ll stay an incredible inspiration and source of insight for us players of the great online game.