zlacker

>>babelf+(OP)
Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success. I think a lot of the advice is applicable to startups.

1. KPIs, for Beast they are CTR, AVD, AVP, will look different if you are a startup. I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders. Because he is literally hacking/being judged by an algorithm, his KPIs will matter more and can be closely dissected. Startups aren't that easy in that sense, but KPIs still matter.

2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.

3. Building value > making money

4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.

5. Understanding that some videos only his team can do, and actively exploiting and widening that gap.

The management/communication stuff is mostly about working on set/dealing with physical scale. You need a lot more hands dealing with logistics, which requires hardline communication and management. In startups, the team is usually really lean and technical, so management becomes more straightforward.

I am also getting some bad culture vibes from the PDF and really dislike the writing style. I think it's important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it's necessary, maybe, for his business. Not for startups. Interesting perspective, reminds me of a chef de cuisine in a cutthroat 90s kitchen. The dishes (videos) have to be perfect, they require a lot of prep and a lot of hands, and you have to consistently pump them out.

>>ocean_+Bb
I’m with you on the management vibes - it doesn’t sound like a culture that I’d enjoy.

That’s one of the things I find so interesting about this document: it does feel very honest and unfiltered, and as such it appears to be quite an accurate insight into their culture.

And that’s a culture that works if you want to create massive successful viral YouTube videos targeting their audience.

How much has that specific chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market? There’s no way to know that, but my hunch is it contributed quite a bit.

>>simonw+ic
At face value, this is not a culture that would reward risk taking. It's very operations focused. Get x done on day y or you're fired. Maybe they do value risk taking on the creative side?

>>greesi+8g
Learning why it’s done the way it’s done before bringing up the beginner questions they get answered over and over is reasonable.

>>j45+Wv
If you're hiring junior people then sure. In Mr Beast's interview with Lex Fridman, he says he actually prefers hiring people from outside the entertainment industry because those folks really want to do what they did before, how they did it before, and not the Mr Beast way. Reading between the lines, I think he ends up hiring a lot of junior people because they're not set in their ways. Also probably they'll work long hours because they're just getting their start.

>>greesi+zw
Makes sense. Training juniors is a thing and maybe this document is also speaking to how at least it's working there.

Past film and tv folks I know have a hard time just diving in and doing it because they're so used to the processes they've had before. Not all are like this, and the ones that aren't, have a huge advantage over juniors with the open mind and experience to boot.

Even the digital side of shooting with a high end phone and editing well enough with tools still seems to not convince them.

On the other side, the OBS crowd, and youtubers are year by year improving their production skills and some of it's kind of starting to look pretty high quality.

Youtube will have no problem if it wants becoming the universal cable network with an obscure channel for pretty much everything that is very decent quality.