Mr. Beast Shares How He Got To 200 Million+ Subscribers On YouTube
5 Takeaways: Two we never follow, and three we always forget.
If you’re a creator, this podcast episode was 2 hours and 32 minutes of pure value.
Mr. Beast (Jimmy Donaldson) is a 23-year-old young man with a following of over 200 million subscribers across 13 Channels. He’s pulled stunts like creating a real-life Squid Game, giving away an island, and hiring a bounty hunter to hunt him down. And he’s generated millions of dollars doing it.
The best part is that he’s not a rich kid — he got here by painstaking grit starting at the age of eleven, making zero money.
He was uploading Minecraft videos on a toaster of a laptop, for god sake.
And with all that grit, over a decade in the game, and a knack for giving things away, he’s truly outdone himself with the tactics he’s shared in his recent podcast with Joe Rogan.
The phenomenal part is that these tactics directly affect anyone creating anything on a platform — not just YouTube.
And the thing that got me from the get-go was one of the first things he said — and it went something like this…
Generating Ideas Are Priority One
In the startup world, you’ll hear a variation of this phrase, “It’s not the ideas, it’s the execution.”
The phrase has become so popular that it’s almost a religious text that can’t be challenged.
We all get it. Any time someone keeps ideas hidden, they don’t get feedback, won’t build it, and the ideas won’t be worth anything. Execution is more important — making the ideas come to life is the real goal.
But for Mr. Beast, it’s 100% about the ideas.
Mr. Beast is adamant that a great idea (along with some other things we’ll get to) is the make-or-break for a good video. He’s got a spreadsheet 200 to 300 ideas strong at any given time that he’ll pick from to make a video.
He’s experimented with:
- Lucid dreaming
- Word generators
- Mastermind groups
- 1-hour brainstorm sessions every day
All for the sake of coming up with ideas that’ll go viral. And this is all absurdly unconventional.
We all know that executing has a lot of weight behind it — and of course, it does.
The problem is that in this modern day and age, as a community of creators and business-inclined individuals, we’ve neglected the idea generation altogether and continually go through this blind process of building things people don’t want.
Lesson 1: We should get back to basics and write down all the good ideas we have, making it an exercise — only then do we get to execution.
Quality > Quantity
This age-old adage has been overwritten recently, so much so that it’s become unconventional to produce phenomenal quality at the expense of quantity.
Every other person online calls for quantity and consistency; hell, even I do. But more importantly, Seth Godin, marketing extraordinaire, does too.
Show up, regularly, consistently, and generously for years and years to organize and lead and build confidence in the change you to seek to make — Seth Godin, This Is Marketing
An article, video, tweet, or blog post every day has become the sure-fire way to grow an audience online. People remember what they see regularly — and YouTubers, Writers, Influencers have all gone this route. The damn platform algorithms reward it too.
So why not try to find an equilibrium of quality and quantity? Why give in to perfectionism? Done is better than in-progress, surely?
Well, not according to Mr. Beast — and his view is worth its weight in gold, so we need to consider it.
His point boils down to this: Quality gives your video exponential success per unit of effort; quantity relies on building a more extensive content repository and achieving incremental (but mediocre) success.
According to Mr. Beast, just off the cuff, putting 20% more effort into a video can triple the outcome of views or monetary gains.
I have a funny feeling that this applies to all content on the internet.
Lesson 2: With time, a creator’s content repository will be full of hundreds of items. The question is, would you instead 1000 “eh” videos, or 100 “holy crap, this is awesome” videos?
Don’t Forget The Total Addressable Market
Mr. Beast has 91.5 million subscribers on his main channel — and yet I keep saying he has over 200+ million subscribers; why?
This guy had a thought. ~4% of the world speak English, but maybe close to 99% of the world wants to see cool stuff on camera. The market was massive, and Mr. Beast was only addressing a fraction of a fraction.
Enter project “literally-employing-whole-teams-of-foreign-dub-voice-actors.”
Mr. Beast launched four clones of his main channel, with these teams professionally dubbing every video.
- Spanish — 17 million subscribers
- Portuguese — 3.73 million subscribers
- Russian — 2.89 million subscribers
- French — 871 thousand subscribers
Each main channel has a separate Reaction video channel that brings in about a third of the viewership too.
Voice actor salaries are between $30k-90k a year. A million views get you $3.4k to $40k, depending on RPM, according to Business Insider. And let me leave you with the fact that Mr. Beast’s Spanish channel has got 1.5 billion views to date — you can do the math here.
Add in Mr. Beast Gaming channels that have a lower cost of revenue and subsidize the main channels, and you’ve got a massive content machine with the goal of addressing everyone it can.
Lesson 3: Old content repurposed and remixed to address new markets is underutilized.
Reinvest Everything
Videos, books, articles, tweets, podcasts — they’re all online, all digital goods, and therefore are already, by definition, capable of infinite leverage.
You don’t have infinite leverage with the stuff that can run out, isn’t reproducible, or can’t be used by 1000 people simultaneously, like money — and Mr. Beast understood that.
The guy’s first purchase with his dollar-a-day earnings was his mic, then his laptop, and so on — not cool clothes or gadgets that wouldn’t improve his videos.
It’s about scale.
This one’s short, simple, and sweet.
Lesson 4: For every dollar we make, if we can spend it disproportionately to make the product better quality, generate more viewership, make more money — then we need to do that for long-term value.
Don’t Do It Solo
Every time I hear the word “Solopreneur,” I get a big smile, and my ears perk up.
I love it. I love everything about the idea, and in an age of infinite leverage that we mentioned before, it’s more than possible.
- Peter Levels, the creator of Nomad List and RemoteOK, makes about ~$250,000 a month.
- Ivan Kuckir, the creator of Photopea, makes about ~$100,000 a month.
- Brett Williams, the creator of Design Joy, makes about ~$100,000 a month.
All these guys are doing it solo, and all of them are making a killing. Infinite leverage and the one-person company is a real thing. But self-improvement here is a struggle.
Mr. Beast’s vision was too big to go it alone, and that’s okay; most people’s visions aren’t that big, and they can go it solo. But the real lesson comes from those years where he was indeed by himself.
Mr. Beast talks about the time he was at 20,000 subscribers and how the iterative process of figuring out the pacing, thumbnails, marketing, and editing was fun work but also slow.
This period was when he and four to five other YouTubers around the same level of subscribers created a daily mastermind group — almost like a daily stand-up, if you will.
This skype call went on every day for over a year. The kicker was that all it took was 3–4 months before they all skyrocketed to 1,000,000 subscribers.
“Mastermind” sounds cheesy, “support group” is overused, and “stand-ups” really should only be done by coders. But, the principle stands strong that learning from your mistakes is linear; learning from each other is exponential.
Lesson 5: Even if you’re solo, the learning part should be with others.
I learned a lot more from this episode, but these were the lessons that stuck out. I hope to publish this and revisit it whenever I feel I’m losing track of what matters.
Reminders are helpful, and I hope some of these helped you remember the basics. Until next time.
Sah out.
Keep up with my shenanigans here — it’s like self-improvement, but for creators.
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