YouTube's founder mode, according to MrBeast

The most famous man on YouTube, Jimmy Donaldson aka MrBeast, is making new waves on Twitter with the apparent leak of a 36-page internal document for new employees at his production company titled "How to succeed in MrBeast production.”

(It is unclear when and how the memo was leaked. Donaldson's publicist, Kovert Creative, did not respond to a request for comment.)

It’s not your typical corporate onboarding document: Just a plain PDF with no company logo that includes page-long paragraphs, grammatical errors, and typos. It contains controversial takes on hustle culture and management styles. But it also offers a sharp breakdown of content creation and virality. 

Here’s what we learned from this rare inside look into YouTube’s biggest empire.

It’s all about one platform.

YouTube, and YouTube only. Donaldson is clear that he doesn’t care how traditional media does things, and his entire way of doing things is based on the belief that YouTube is and will still be the future. He explains the three key metrics of a YouTube video, including the click-through rate, average view duration, and average view percentage, while breaking down a typical video into three segments.

“I just need you to make people watch as long as possible,” he said. It’s not clear when this document was written and whether the rise of bite-sized content has changed his approach (MrBeast now also posts daily shorts). 

There might be a other new threats to that paradigm as well. 

MrBeast now has 315 million subscribers on YouTube, and he became the most subscribed channel in YouTube’s history in June. But there’s a caveat: MrBeast may have reached his peak on the platform. MrBeast is being challenged by a new generation of mini-Beasts. These upstarts copied MrBeast’s use of thumbnails and narratives, just as described in the onboarding memo, as well as his editing style known as “retention editing.” And judging by the “Beastification” of YouTube, these young creators are succeeding. 

Contrary to what boomers might think, MrBeast says “USE CONSULTANTS”

In all caps, too. 

Because I've spent almost a decade of my life hyper obsessing over youtube, I can show a brand new creator how to go from 100 subscribers to 10,000 in a month. On their own it would take them years to do it. Consults are a gift from god, please take advantage of them. In every single freakin task assigned to you, always always always ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you. This is so important that I am demanding you repeat this three times in your head “I will always check for consultants when i’m assigned a task”

The idea is simple: You find the experts who have done it before and pay them to teach you. He is unlikely to be referring to the generalist consulting firms that use fancy words like “organizational streamlining” to advise companies on conducting layoffs, however. 

Be careful about your information diets 

I enjoy this bit from the memo most: You can’t get inspired by things you don’t know exist. Donaldson wrote that in order for you to understand culture and write good content, you need to consume everything on social media. 

For the Sherwood readers reading this story right now, here’s from MrBeast to you:

But let’s imagine a different Chris, let’s say instead of cartoons and stupid shit, his information diet was stocks and investing advice. And for 5 years that’s all he consumed. Do you think he’d be just as funny as he currently is? No. He in my opinion wouldn’t even be 20% as funny.

I’d say many people on the Sherwood team who consume and write about stocks are pretty funny. But perhaps my bar is low.

The numbers are huge 

You can't talk about MrBeast videos without talking about budgets. A few numbers that caught my eyes:

Do not leave consteatants [sic] waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more

He probably means "contestants" in the video "$456,000 Squid Game In Real Life" here, which he’s said cost at least $3.5 million to fund. But it’s all worth it to him, because:

I see a world where this company is worth billions and one day 10s of billions.

For context, court filings showed that MrBeast was expected to make $700 million in revenue this year.