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- Mr Beast's production manual was leaked 👀
Hey!
In this letter I’m going to share my take-aways’s from How to Succeed in Mr. Beast Production, a handbook for employees of one Jimmy Donaldson, the 26 year old media mogul known as Mr. Beast. The 36 page handbook was leaked on twitter and has since been the subject of many takes and takeaways.
But still… I want to give you my take.. Why? I’ve been running daily production on the web for nearly 20 years. I also have network experience, and a traditional film school education. I think that I can provide a different perspective. But you be the judge.
So download it, read it, let’s get into it…
Oh, btw, here’s my mark up of the document. This may be useless to you because of my terrible handwriting, but it doesn’t hurt to include:
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Why should you care…
about this “Mr. Beast” and his handbook? Two reasons…
Mr. Beast is the Michael Jordan of Youtube. Do you know who has been more successful than Jimmy Donaldson at mastering a social media algorithm? No one. Ever. His audience is massive. 316M subs on Youtube, videos on his main channel usually beat 60M.
He keeps Youtube’s algorithm in a cage in his basement. This handbook is your chance to see exactly what he feeds it.
Mr. Beast converts audience into business. Donaldson is up there with Logan Paul and Joe Rogan as among the most successful business builders in the creator economy. He has a chocolate company that will do $200M this year. He’s got Mr. Beast Burger. He’s got a streaming deal with Amazon (for now). He just launched a Lunchables competitor (with Logan Paul as a matter of fact).
Personality led growth cannot be the future unless we can convert audience into business growth. Jimmy is on the bleeding edge of that, and he’s doing it on a massive scale.
The first thing that struck me in reading this is how clear Donaldson is on his business strategy, and how deeply he integrates that into the way he makes content.
The handbook is written almost stream of consciousness in a super casual “don’t care about HR bs sort of way,” full of “hahahahaha’s” that makes tech bros adjust their pants while labor lawyers salivate.
But the business strategy cuts through - in what he expects out of his employees, his production strategy, and his content.
Reading this handbook gave me insight into a few important elements of that strategy, so let’s frame our breakdown around those points:
Donaldson has conviction about the space
He lives inside the mind of his customer
Data drives his decision making
His secret sauce is differentiation
Mr. Beast’s Master Plan
All great entrepreneurs have a vision, and its usually some kind of conviction about their industry, their product, their customers… something. For Mr. Beast, it’s Youtube.
Youtube is the future and I believe with every fiber of my body it’s going to keep growing year over year and in 5 years Youtuve will be bigger than anyone will have ever imagined.
You can’t say it clearer than that, and he says it right up front. He describes an “A Player” employee (cue cynical GenX eyeroll), and one of the qualities he points to? Believes in Youtube.
He demands that his employees “get obsessed” with the platform.
Get rid of Netflix and Hulu and watch tons of Youtube… The more invested you are in our world on Youtube the more you’ll understand trends, how we can stand out and be more original
Hollywood is over, Youtube is the future is not a vision unique to Donaldson, but I’m struck by how ingrained and actionable he makes it:
We are not hollywood. 99% of movies or tv shows would flop on Youtube.
Which is correct, actually. They’re making youtube videos. He’s telling his team to ignore hollywood and make great Youtube videos.
Whether you believe his conviction about Youtube, it is self-evident that Youtube is different. If Donaldson wants to make a business bet on his conviction, then the content has to be optimized for the platform, and he makes that point clearly to his team. I think youtube is the future so I only care about whether we’re making great youtube videos.
The other strong conviction here is that the only way to succeed is to keep getting better, to stay one step ahead of his own success.
I have 0 issues throwing away a multi million dollar video if I don’t think it’s up to my standards and is good for the audience. We must always be improving and innovating.
Welcome to the mind of a teenage memer who likes video games
That’s how Jimmy describes his target audience, even as he acknowledges that almost everyone watches his videos at this point.
All great entrepreneurs know their customer intimately, and Donaldson certainly fits that mold, but what struck me was how much time he spends thinking from the perspective of his audience, and how smart he is about using process to get his entire team to focus on the customer literally all the time.
In describing thumbnails
You’d feel like you were lied to and click off
On hooking his audience…
They’ve seen this man survive multiple days in the woods and emotionally now they want to see how much further he can go
…and reeling them in
Once you have someone for 6 minutes they are super invested in the story and probably in what I call a “lull”. They are watching the video without even realizing they are watching a video.
Look at how he breaks down the shape of a retention graph, which shows how long viewers are hanging with his videos…
Page 9
It’s completely from the perspective of the viewer.
Mr Beast story structure is described by the minute. Minute one, minutes 1 thru 3, , etc. When I saw that, I wrote “Lol!” in my notes. How literal can you get, right? HAHAHAHA.
But actually, I am the asshole and this is genius.
He is forcing his team to be constantly thinking from the perspective of the audience.
It’s not minute one for the creators, it’s minute one for the audience. He is structuring his videos around how the audience needs to be feeling beat by beat, and his structure reminds the team exactly how long everything they write or produce should be.
Whether it is production, creative, or editing, you must always know what minute mark the content you are working on is.
This structure was one of my favorite things about reading the handbook. It’s so simple and clarifying that I made a pdf of it. I’m going to stick it up on my wall to remind me exactly how to make content FOR my audience.
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He keeps this intimate understanding even as his audience scales and broadens:
Our audience is massive and because of that you have to be simple, for 50 million people to understand something it must be simple.”
You can also see how his conviction about upping his game intersects with his understanding of audience:
The viewer may think they want a format forever, but they don’t. They want new and fresh things (this is evident because every channel that rehashes formats for years always dies)”
The guy’s got a handle on his KPIs
It comes as no surprise that a guy who has defeated the Youtube algorithm is highly focused on data. He claims in the handbook to have spent 20,000 to 30,000 hours studying Youtube, and he makes use of it.
Everything he does, everything he expects his team to do, he backs up with data. He judges them based on data, and asks them to judge themselves based on it.
What’s relevant here, I think, is what data he focuses on.
The three metrics you guys need to care about is Click Thru Rate (CTR), Average View Duration (AVD), and Average View Percentage (AVP)
He tells his team to get used to those abbreviations because they talk in terms of these three metrics all the time.
CTR = how many people see his thumbnail and title divided by how many click it.
AVD = how long on average people watch a video
AVP = what percentage of the video people watch (this is how he decides how long to make his videos)
He spends many pages of the handbook describing exactly what he learns from each of these metrics. The screengrab above about the shape of the AVD graph gives you a taste.
Oh, and it’s worth noting that all of these metrics create a picture of audience behavior on the platform. This is in keeping with his conviction about the platform and his focus on audience.
His conviction about constantly upping his game is reflected in the other metric he pays attention to “of ten”... how does a given video rank compared to the last ten videos uploaded by Mr. Beast. “1 out of 10 good. 10 out of 10 bad.”
The Wow Factor
If I could point to one thing that quantifies Mr. Beast’s success, it would be something that he calls a “non-trackable thing about virality”: The “wow factor”
An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video. We offered someone $500,000 if they could live in a circle in a field for 100 days and instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.
Donaldson talks so intelligently about spectacle throughout the handbook. It seems to come to him effortlessly how to be constantly increasing the “Wow factor.”
I think about Mr. Beast’s spectacle in terms of big splashy spends like the example above, but he points out that giving away a year's supply of Doritos is a bigger wow than a $20,000 cash prize even though it only costs $1,825. Why? He thinks “our audience would find it fucken hilarious.”
And he’s crystal clear that, when it comes to his content, spectacle IS differentiation.
Anytime we do something that no other creator can do, that separates us in their minds and makes our videos more special to them. It changes how they see us and it does make them watch more videos and engage more with the brand. You can’t track the “wow factor” but I can describe it. Anything that no other YouTuber can do. And it’s important that we never lose our wow.
In conclusion
One other very important take away…
The video endings must always be abrupt to protect retention.
🦋, AE