How Mr. Beast Became Successful on YouTube

Yeah, it's been crazy because I've been doing it since I was 11. Really? Yeah, so now I'm 23. And so it's just like, basically every year it just gotten crazier and crazier. I used to make a dollar a day. Well, the first few years I wasn't even making money off YouTube. But once I started making money, I was making a dollar a day and I saved up for a couple months. I bought a microphone, saved up for half a year. I got a computer and I've just always reinvested it. And so it's like literally just all... I mean, I was like as awkward as they came. No money, no nothing. And I just basically just obsessed over YouTube every day for a decade. Are your first episodes available when you're 11 years old? No, because I had a friend when I was 13 that found my channel. And so I deleted all the videos. I got really self-conscious. Oh no. But so everything from 13 and up is there. Yeah, they're fucking terrible. That's still cool. So what did you do when you first started? What was the first idea? The very first video, weirdly enough, I played this stupid game and some hacker killed my base when I was 11. And so I uploaded it. And my first video got 20,000 views instantly because all the people that played the game was like, oh shit, you can hack in this game. It's a game called Battle Pirates. I guarantee you no one listens. What is it called? Battle Pirates. No one here has ever heard of it. Battle Card? Battle Pirates. Battle Pirates. Yeah, it was a really small game. But I uploaded that and I got 20,000 views. And that was probably the best thing that could have ever happened to me because then I was hooked from day one. And most people, it takes hundreds of videos before you get one view. And somehow the very first video I uploaded at 11 got 20,000 views. And then I was just like, oh, I fell in love. And I've been hooked ever since. Wow. So it was kind of almost by accident. Essentially, yeah. Because this was way before YouTube was even a thing. No one was really a YouTuber. Hardly anyone made money. When did YouTube first launch? Like 2006 or whatever. This was a thing, but the partner program wasn't really a thing. No one was making money. And it was definitely back before it was cool. When I was doing YouTube when I was 14 and 15, now it's cool if you want to be a YouTuber in high school or middle school. Back then, no one gave a fuck. You're just worried they would try to play your videos in class or make funny or stuff like that for it. How did it evolve to what it is now? Was it a vision? Was it a slow, sort of a gradual increase in numbers? Yeah. It was about as slow as it gets. When I was a young teenager, I was getting no views, had no money, had no equipment. So for the most part, I was just trying to scrounge money so I could buy equipment because I was using my brother's old laptop. So my first couple hundred videos, I didn't have a microphone. Imagine just like a crackly, terrible voice. And so once I got monetized, I saved up for a few months. Like I told you, I bought a microphone. I didn't just give you a mile high history. And I saved up for like six months. I mean, I was just doing video game videos and they were terrible. But I saved up. I got a real computer. So now I can actually record the video game at high quality. I have a microphone. I'm like 15 and I just kept going and going. I'm trying to figure out like what are some of the hot spots? Essentially up until 18, I had been doing YouTube pretty religiously, but I was making no money. Like this is kind of the turning point was when I graduated from high school and my whole life I was like, I want to be making enough money by the time I graduated to do this full time. I was only making a couple hundred bucks a month. So I graduated high school and my mom was like either move out or go to a community college and I didn't have enough money to move out. But I really just I hated school with a passion. But she forced me to go to community college. And that was that was the worst thing ever. Like that that made me hate life like borderline suicidal. I just can't stand like having to just sit there and listen to this dumb stuff and listen to some teacher read out a book. So what I did was I would act like I was going to community college, but I would just work on videos in my car and edit and stuff like that. I had straight zeros. And so now the clock had started because like once my mom found out I was screwed. Were you aware of that? Like you're running a risk? Yeah, exactly. And so I would act like I was going to college the whole time, but I wasn't and I didn't have enough money to move out. And that was kind of when I was just like 15 hours a day all in. I was like, I'm fucked if this doesn't work. And I actually I had some videos pop off. I couldn't tell you which ones, but I had a month where I made 20 grand because I just had some videos just do really, really well. And then I came home and I was like, yeah, I haven't been going to college. And I moved out the next day. My mom almost had a heart attack because she she doesn't understand YouTube or anything back then. And she just like she was like, man, this guy's gonna work at McDonald's. I wasted all this time. Like I invested 18 years in this one. I get where were you living? What part of the country? North Carolina. That's where I've lived almost my whole life. And so how does she feel now? Oh, she's great. She's like she's happy. She loves it. You know, put her in front of her friends. She loves talking about it. Oh, I always knew little Jimmy was going to be a success. She doesn't try to hide it. We would fight all the time, even in high school. Like, you know, I never once studied. I never I literally wouldn't even take my books home. Like I I legit don't think I studied once all of high school at my house. And so we would fight a lot. I didn't have the best grades. And so I would I would just make videos and she didn't understand it, especially because back then it was just a whole different world. Like, yeah, there wasn't really a thing as a full time YouTube and stuff. And so there's a lot of a lot of arguments, a lot of drama. But it ended up working out. She's happy. The thing is, it's like nobody saw this coming. Right. So you can't you can't blame her. Especially me and like the middle of North Carolina in a small town. I like horrible acne. I'm you know, especially back then. Really awkward. It's like no one like people would have bet a million dollars that I wouldn't be a YouTuber. You know, it makes no sense. But I just like I have, you know, hyper obsession and I love this. And, you know, you give it enough time, anyone can solve it. Well, there's a lesson in that for people, really, like to just if you do have a hyper obsession or something, there's a lot of people that think that because they're bad at school or because they're not interested in school, that they're destined to be a loser. Yeah. And that's not true. You can. The problem is school is too rigid. Like regular public school systems sit down under employed, underpaid teacher, disinterested, not really connected with the work. You're not connected with it. You just can't wait to go home and do what you like to do. Exactly. And you get this thought in your head like, oh, my God, I'm going to be a loser. I mean, that's how I was when I was in high school. I thought I was going to be a loser. Well, and you take it a step further because I thought especially if you're like extremely passionate about something at a young age for most kids are then you're even it's more exacerbated that it's like, you know, I like I didn't talk to anyone. I hardly had any friends because I was so obsessed with YouTube as back then, just no one cared. So it's like I thought I just like just didn't even know how to speak. Like literally, I just couldn't hold a conversation with a single person because people would just tell me all you talk about is YouTube. And I would try to talk about something else. But back then I was so hyper obsessed. I literally just didn't know how to. But were you obsessed about were you obsessed about other channels, your channel? Everything from like learning how to editing the pacing of the videos, like ideas, what's going viral, what's training, what's hot. Especially back then, I had no idea what worked. I mean, I had to like self teach myself everything, even, you know, frame rate on cameras, coloring of the video, just stuff like that. And how did you learn? Did you learn from YouTube? Yeah. Well, so YouTube videos and tutorials or something? Most of my growth came actually after I graduate high school. Basically, what I did was I somehow found these other like for lunatics. We were three of us for college dropouts. One was a high school dropout and one, I don't know, he just like quit his job. We all were super small YouTubers. And we basically talked every day for a thousand days in a row and did nothing but just like hyper study. Like what makes a good video? What makes a good thumbnail? What's good pacing? Like how to go viral? And we would just call it like daily masterminds. We would just get on Skype every morning and like some days, like I'd get on Skype at 7 a.m. and I'd be in the call until like 10 p.m. and I'd go to bed, I'd wake up, I'd do it again. And you know, we do things like take a thousand thumbnails and see if like there's correlation to the brightness of the thumbnail, how many views it got or like, you know, like videos that get over 10 million views. It's like how often do they cut the camera angles or like things like that. Really? So you micro analyzed everything. Yeah, just I mean, for like we were very religious about it. And so that's that's where most of my knowledge came from, is I just surround myself with these lunatics and just every day. Like we didn't do anything. We had no life. But everybody had sort of a similar vision. Yeah, exactly. So we all had like 10, 20,000 subscribers when we met. And by the time we stopped talking, we all had millions of subscribers. And we all hit a million subscribers like within a month. It's crazy because it's like you envision a world where you're trying to be great at something and it's just like you learning and fucking up and learning from your mistakes. Also, my mom told me not to curse. Sorry, mom. If someone could just like edit out the swear words and give it to me. Sorry, mom. Yeah, so I could give it to my mom to listen to. That would be great. But like, you know, you mess up, you learn from your mistake, you mess up, you learn from your mistake. You in two years, you know, might have learned from 20 mistakes. Or if you have like four other people who are also messing up and when they learn from the mistake, they teach you what they learn. So hypothetically, you two years down the road have learned like five times more of the amount of stuff. So it just like helps you grow exponentially way quicker, if that makes any sense. It does. Yeah, so. But it's interesting that you thought about it that way and sort of a systematic approach. Like, this is not dumb luck. No, I mean, it was like, like they say 10,000 hours a master, something that we put on like 40,000, 50,000 hours. We're talking like every day, all day, like literally nothing. We had no friends outside of the group. That was your life. I'm actually rereading that book right now, that Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers, that talks about that 10,000 hours principle. It totally applies to what you did. 100%. I mean, it sounds like you were just all day, every day, which makes sense. And what do you have now? 90 million subscribers? Well, we cross everything. We're closing in on 200 million subscribers. Jeez! Yeah, because have you seen our dub channels? No. Can you pull that up? Just search MrBeast and Estebanio. So we actually, which I'm kind of curious why you don't do this. We do our videos in other languages as well. Really? Yeah. Wow. I can't wait to show you this because I actually have a really cool story. Very most type of thing I do. Just go to the channel so you can trust it. Who does this? We do. So you hire someone? Yeah, we have voice actors and everything. Wow. So these are the exact same videos on my main channel, but we pay voice actors to dub over them. We translate the text and the video everything. MrBeast and Estebanio. Yeah, that was actually one of the fastest growing channels last year. It was just our videos. That's so smart. Okay, now click on a video so we can kind of hear it. And so scroll down so we can see the comments. It's all in Spanish. That's dope. Yeah, so that's now just I won't pull them all up. Any other countries? Yeah, search MrBeast Brazil. We do it a bunch of times. So you got a Portuguese translator as well. Yeah. Wow, that's dope. Yeah, same thing here. Oh, what a great idea, man. Yeah, because if you Google it, it's like only whatever. Less than 10% of the world speaks English, so 90% of the world can't even enjoy your content. And when I realized that, I was like, wait a minute. 90% of the world can't even watch this stuff. And so go back to the Spanish one real quick, because that's our biggest one. And sorry for anyone watching who doesn't have the visuals. So set it to most popular. We just started doing this like six months ago, and it's crazy how viral some of these videos are going. Wow, 51 million. Yeah. The problem with me is I don't know if someone's going to translate if they're going to say exactly what I said. Well, you have quality control. So before a video gets uploaded, we have three different people who basically write the transcript. And then if the words don't line up on all three, then... Or sorry, let me think about the process. We have something like that, because I was worried about that as well. I think we take the original transcript, and then we have it dubbed. And then after stuff, we have two different people write out. And if it doesn't line up with the original, then it's a red flag, and then we look at it. And we built some system where I don't have to worry about that. And the final point is, in Spanish, the guy who does my doves is the same guy who doves Spider-Man. We managed to convince him. So a lot of those comments are like, why does he sound like Spider-Man? Or is Mr. B Spider-Man? That's hilarious. Yeah, and so what we do is when we go into these markets, we get celebrities to do my voice. So then the local people in the language freak out. So Japan's coming up, and I can't say who, but we secured a giant voice actor from an anime to do my doves. And whenever we launch in Japan, I know they're going to lose their freaking minds. That's a brilliant idea. That's so smart. So you have how many employees then? I mean, across everything, over 100. I don't know. Wow. And what are you, 23? Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, it's wild. I think I just had the blessing of finding what I loved at a young age. So like, to get to this level, it takes a decade. Most people don't find what they love until their young 20s, so they'd be where I'm at in their 30s. I just lucked out and found it when I was really young. It's that, but it's also your vision. The fact, one of the things that I was really impressed by when I started looking into you after my daughter introduced me is that you invest so much money into the show. All the money I make, why do I need money? So you don't go crazy, you don't have a Ferrari or anything? No. I think living your life chasing a nicer, nicer car in a bigger and bigger box of living is kind of a dumb way to go about life. Yeah. I actually, funny enough, I lived in a super below average home, and I kind of learned why famous people don't live in below average homes, because someone broke in, stole everything I owned. I had to get a little nicer house for security reasons, but before I was robbed, my place was a little duplex, $700 a month. You get a roommate's 360 split. Right. Yeah, and just drive a normal car. Well, now I drive a Tesla just because of getting off of gas and stuff like that. Right. But yeah. So you don't go crazy at all with cash? No. I really try not to. I think that's just a bad way to go about life. Also, it is a little hypocritical, because I run a nonprofit, and have you seen our Beast Philanthropy channel? No. Can you pull that up as well? We do a lot of stuff for helping people, and so also if I lived in a $10 million mansion, while I'm feeding people and trying to help people, in my eyes, it's also a little hypocritical as well. In every area, I feel like it's just better if I just live below my needs. Which is very wise for a young man, because a lot of 23-year-olds would be balling out of their fucking mind right now. Zoom out? Well, yeah, I also have some stories about that too. You do? Yeah, because I did have a phase where I did ball out a little bit, and then I realized, yeah, this doesn't make me happy. What did you do during the ball-and-out phase? I bought an I8, and I also bought some designer clothes, like some $1,000 shirts and stuff like that. Ironically, all of which was stolen, one of my houses was broken into. So it's kind of perfect, because I was like, I don't know if I really care about this stuff anymore, and then someone just stole all my expensive shit, and I was like, perfect.