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.
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.
And though the advice isn't particularly novel, it was worth reading since a surprisingly large amount of people don't do these simple things.
Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?
This source is pure gold: techniques to manipulate people into consuming your product - which they otherwise wouldn't be. All so you can make money on poisoning their minds (advertising, which is how you convert views to money). You can easily imagine this came out from a drug cartel boss, I'd expect the best and most ruthless one to operate just like that, with same level of cultishness.
And if that's who Mr Beast is, and that's how he thinks of other people - because believe it or not, viewers are other people too, not some cattle to be milked and slaughtered - then I'm glad I don't watch his videos. Not going to, and I'm happy to pass this document around to dissuade others from viewing his channel.
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[0] - I mean, that's kind of obvious in anything social media, but rarely do you get it spelled out without any qualms.
See I didn’t read it that way at all. I read that as a statement of a concept I’ve always heard about when coordinating between groups. Effectively “pick a person in the other group to be your liaison and your counterpart and coordinate directly, don’t just throw stuff over the wall and hope someone picks it up”. It’s the same basic psychological concept as “in an emergency situation pick one person in the crowd, point them out and tell them personally to go call 911”. Diffusion of responsibility means people will delay or stuff will get dropped. To make things happen you have to make sure things are assigned. Surely this isn’t particularly surprising or controversial right? It’s why large teams often appoint “interrupt” workers who are appointed to specifically answer out of band requests coming in. It’s why you have an on call rotation instead of just paging the entire company if something goes down. It’s why agile appoints a “scrum master” whose singular mission is to clear up blocking issues for the team. It’s why if you don’t assign people to work on maintenance, maintenance won’t get done.
I read that part of the document as saying “if you’re in charge of producing a video due in 45 days, don’t just send a general request for someone to make a script to the writing department, pick a person and get on the same page about what needs to be done and when”
In an emergency situation you single out random person precisely because there are no set processes who should be doing that, so you create responsibility impromptu.
In any half-functional organization work item with a deadline accepted by someone means THEY take responsibility to deliver in time and communicate any blockers. Having to constantly prod counterparty in another team signals totally broken and/or inexistent project management. It fits a lean startup where everyone is responsible for everything and everything is a fire you distinguish right there and move on. It does not fit organization where exponential growth of communication channels means communication becomes the bottleneck.