How I Built This with Guy Raz - HIBT Lab! MKBHD: Marques Brownlee

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

“Right now I have approximately 70-ish subscribers,” declared a teenage Marques Brownlee at the beginning of his 100th YouTube video back in 2009. Marques recorded his first of many product reviews earlier that year, after buying his first laptop. Quite simply, he wanted others to have more information about this computer than he did when he bought it. Since then, Marques has grown his channel, MKBHD, into a full-fledged business with more than 16 million subscribers and over 3 billion total views. He’s expanded beyond reviews too, posting interviews with well-known public figures like Kobe Bryant, Bill Gates and Elon Musk. This week on How I Built This Lab, Marques reflects on his journey as a content creator and how he turned a love of tech into a lucrative and sustainable business. Plus, he shares his philosophy for building a strong team – which interestingly enough, is inspired by an octopus...See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better your home might be worth more than you think find out how much at arbb.ca slash host hello and welcome to how i built this lab i'm guy ross so for those of listening to the lab for the first time this is the place where we get to talk to entrepreneurs

with big disruptive ideas that could maybe maybe make our world a better place. We also talk to return guests who've been on the show to hear about the things have been up to since they were last on, and also people who are making a name for themselves in the creator economy. And my guest today is almost like the anti-y YouTuber. He's soft-spoken, he's self-effacing, almost camera-shy, he's kind and friendly, and also one of the biggest YouTubers on the planet. His name is Marquez Brownlee, and he's the creator of the MKBHD channel. And since 2009,

Marquez has been reviewing gadgets, computers, phones, earbuds, TVs, you name it. And he's widely considered to be among the best tech reviewers in the world. Today, his channel has more than 16 million subscribers, over 3 billion views. And his team of 13 producers and editors also makes a podcast and other YouTube shows

related to technology. When Marquez recorded his first YouTube video back in 2009, the intention was to help point out cool things on an HP laptop that he just bought. He never planned to become a YouTuber. But as his channel grew and his videos became better and more polished, Marquez decided to build a business around his work. And he says pretty much since he can remember, he's been a gearhead. I was definitely pretty much as early as I can remember into tech in some way. I guess my earliest exposure to that was like an old VHS camera trying to like record a video but then didn't have a computer so I had to edit the video in the camera by cutting together

different clips in the shooting process. Yeah. It was fun. It was just fun to be able to like make something using technology. I thought that was the coolest thing. Then yeah, I quickly got into computers. So the second I could use a computer, the second I could own a computer, like that was what I was obsessed with.

And yeah, I pretty quickly became the tech kid. So that's been since day one. And you come from a tech family, right? Like I think your dad worked in a tech sector, right? Yeah, my dad still works in IT. My mom was in financials. But yeah, that definitely helped a bit as far as like exposure to someone being computer savvy pretty early.

I know that you were a little kid in the 90s. what were some of the coolest things that you remember just discovering and playing around with? Yeah, as a family growing up, we didn't actually have a ton of technology. And I think that was on purpose. Like, my mom only had one TV in the house and it was in the basement. So, like, any time we spent on the TV was, like, precious before, you know, we weren't allowed to use it after a certain time. But there was still, like, this background interest in gadgets and computers and things like that.

And then I do remember, like I said, sort of the earliest piece of tech I was able to interact with was a camera. And then later after that, I'm growing up in the 90s. Like I finally got a computer in high school, so I had a laptop. And that's sort of the beginning of my modern gadget history, you know, the beginning of smartphones and gadgets. So there's a just charming, delightful video of you. I don't know if it embarrasses you or not, but I think it's delightful. It's just sweet. And it was recorded around 2009.

Alright, welcome to my first video. I think you were like maybe a freshman in sophomore in high school. What a new laptop. And you are reviewing a laptop called the HP Pavilion. DV7T. So of course I got the... And very earnestly talking about this laptop. Quite a nice one.

It's very basic. It's like a camera point at you. It's almost like a FaceTime video. Yeah. So I'm going to do a very, very short review of it. Obviously I can't show you what it does on the screen because I'm recording. bring it on the laptop. Pardon the light behind me, by the way.

Tell me how you got the idea to even just put that up there. Yeah, you're right. 2009, you know, I didn't have any other YouTube videos online. I was just sort of watching a lot of videos. I was a sophomore in high school, and it was finally going to make sense to have my own computer. You know, we had a family computer up in the office, but like, wow, I'm going to have my own computer.

This is the craziest thing ever. Okay, I'm going to spend my allowance money on an approved computer. that my parents are going to let me actually buy. And so I wanted to do as much research as possible, watch as many videos, watch as many reviews, read as many articles as humanly possible so I could know everything about every laptop so I could buy the exact perfect laptop for me.

And that's what I did. I read everything I possibly could. There turned out to be sites at the time. HP let you build your own laptop on their site. I thought that was the craziest thing. I could choose exactly how much RAM it had and what options I would pick out. And eventually I picked one out.

And that was the HP Pavilion DV7T. And I spent the money and I got it. And when I got it, I felt like in person I noticed a couple things that I didn't notice in the videos. And so my natural response was, well, I did just watch a whole bunch of videos about this and I somehow never saw this in any of the videos.

So I'm going to open up the laptop, turn the webcam on, and just record a video to, explain what I found which is this little Windows Media Center remote. This button here has a small letter I on it. It's not very clear, but it basically brings up all the things like the BlackBerry menu you might have been familiar with. It brings up all the options you can do with that particular piece of media. And I hit stop and then I just went to YouTube.com and then just uploaded that video and posted it. Leave comments

and subscribe. Thanks. So now if anyone else was in my shoes, they would also have that video to watch that they could make an even better choice when buying their laptop. Hmm. And it was just totally earnest.

You weren't trying to perform for the camera or to be silly. It was literally like, almost like a university seminar. And you just put up there to contribute to this body of work. It was like you were kind of just doing it for this community of people who were interested in this laptop.

Exactly. Yeah. And it's sort of like, grew directly from that. Like, oh, you know, now that I found this laptop, I did the first video on that, but then there was also the cooler that I bought for the laptop,

and then there was some software that I bought for the laptop, and it's just like, yeah, you know, more people are going to be in the same purchase decision as me, so I might as well just upload these videos real quick just to make sure other people have this information too.

Yeah. So, yeah, just trying to be valuable a little bit, I guess is how it started. And just talking about the product, like the good, the bad, whatever it was. Yeah. And again, this is like early YouTube. So very few people were watching your videos, but you kept at it.

You kept making them and uploading them again with the thinking that like this is just for this small group of people who want to know about these things that I have too. Yeah, exactly. There was no such thing as a YouTuber in 2009. Right. There wasn't any like view counts to pay. I mean, there were view counts, but it's not like I paid super close attention to them. this was early days of online video so yeah it didn't really matter how many people watched the videos what mattered was that the video was available for people to watch if they were in the same

shoes that I was in yeah but yeah in the beginning it was just like this video deserves to exist um I read that by the time you posted your hundredth video you had 78 subscribers and what were those hundred videos on were you just buying a bunch of things and reviewing them? Like, what were you reviewing? There were a couple things I bought. Early videos included the cooler that I bought, the mouse and keyboard that I bought. Right. But I did a bunch of videos on freeware, which is just, there's screen recordings of just free software stuff and like customizing the laptop. So there were Windows themes that I showed you how to install and different alternate browsers that I showed

people how to customize and get working the way they wanted. So in this quest of making my own perfect laptop, I'm like showing people how to do the stuff that I did along the way. So that adds up pretty quickly to a lot of quick one-take videos about laptop accessories. You know, I think this is still like kind of the innocent days of the internet when we all kind of trusted everything and told everything about our lives and told Facebook more than we tell the Social Security administration or the Census Bureau. But, Were your parents at all like, hey, Marquez, what are you doing? Why are you putting videos of yourself on the internet?

Or were they okay with it? That's a good question. So basically, yeah, one day my parents brought me down to the kitchen table and I said, hey, YouTube videos, huh? You know, they found them somehow. I don't even know. You'd have to ask them how they found them. But yeah, YouTube videos.

Like, that's a hobby. You know, ask me about it, how I was enjoying it or whatever. And basically the only advice was like, don't reveal unnecessary person. personal information about yourself or where you live because you know it's the internet anyone could be on there yeah and uh I think they just figured there's way worse things their kid could be doing in their spare time and so yeah if grades are slipping we'll tell you to stop but like otherwise have fun so you're making these videos quietly you went to college you studied at a engineering school Stevens Institute technology and I think their specialty is mechanical engineering I'm imagining that when you went to college you were not imagining a future as a YouTuber, but a future as a mechanical engineer. It was somewhere along those lines. So, you know, by the time I was choosing a college to go to, I had been doing videos for a couple of years at that point,

built up a little bit of an audience. And actually, YouTube became somewhat of an established real profession, which is really interesting. There were people doing it full time. And so what that meant was there were YouTubers that had relationships with tech companies and product companies where they might send, a product to a YouTube channel to make a video about. And I'd sort of dabbled a little bit in the beginnings of those things. And so when I went to school, I actually figured as someone

studying business and technology, I would probably end up as one of those people, one of the people that works at a tech company that can engage with the media that is knowledgeable about a product since I'd seen both sides of it. Yeah. So that was kind of your plan, But your plan, of course, was derailed by videos that started to really go viral. And I think the first one that really blew up was this video you did of the LG Flex, which I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist anymore as a cell phone. You know, it was like this hot new thing because it was bendy and it was scratchproof. You like squash it down and you scratch it with a knife. And you were just doing this all on your own, right?

You were editing and filming these just by yourself. Yeah, at this point I'm like taking my camera and a tripod to go shoot at like a table and a bench in the park or I'd just be in my dorm room or whatever. Yeah. But yeah, I remember that too. LGG flex was like it was a flexible OLED display, but they had to build the components to be flexible too. So the phone could kind of bend a little bit, which is crazy. Hey, what is up guys? I'm KBHD here.

And this is the LGG flex, quite possibly the most interesting phone in the world right now. And then on top of that, they had a self-healing back. You know, anytime you hear a crazy claim like that from a smartphone manufacturer, you're like, well, I guess I got to test this. So I decided to do a full test of my own. I did this for you guys. So thumbs up for that down below. So I took a knife to it. I just started cutting it up and then putting it to the test, seeing how long it would take to self-heel.

And sure enough, when it pulls that off on video, yeah, people click. People are interested in watching that. There was a lightbulb moment, you know, and I quickly understood that there was a market for quick, timely information in the form of a high-es-term. quality video. So yeah, that was a probably pretty early taste at, like, people who are not subscribed to the channel watching the videos anyway. Sort of a discoverability light bulb for me. We're going to take a very quick break, but when we come back more from Marquez Brownlee, the creator behind the tech-focused YouTube channel, MKBHD. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest

today is Marquez Brownlee, whose YouTube channel, MKBHBHBH. The PhD has more than 16 million subscribers. You know, I interview celebrities and founders and, you know, really that two people that my kids wanted to stay home from school were you and Casey Neistadt. You know, you have such a massive audience, particularly of young people and of kids who use these products. But one of the things that I really like about what you do and you've done this from the beginning is you're very atypical. You're not like, hey, what's up, fan? Yeah. It's your man, you know, Marquez here, and I'm, you know, and you don't do that.

You're almost like, like, you're almost like the anti-yutuber. Like, you're very understated and quiet and thoughtful, and your videos are very crisp, and you deliver things in a very measured way. Like, it's, it flies in the face of all the conventional wisdom of what makes something go viral. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's funny. You mentioned the original goal.

and this is kind of still true today, is I'm trying to make videos that I would want to watch. Yeah. And so I didn't really start off watching, like the super animated, like yelling at the camera type YouTube because, honestly,

I just didn't enjoy watching it that much. So I was watching other tutorials and other gadget videos or whatever. And so I just kept making what I would want to watch and I slowly was able to develop a way of talking to a camera over time. But it's funny, the other part of that,

which is even more true today than ever, is like there are lots of people trying to make YouTube videos, right? Yeah. You can watch any number of a million videos from anyone from me to Casey to the Mr. Beast of the world to any other. There's a ton. They're all competing for attention. And often the subject of the video is the person.

Right. And so in order for it to be an interesting video, the person and the thing they're doing has to constantly be interesting. And for me, I've been lucky enough that I do product videos. So a lot of other product YouTube video creators can relate to this, which is like the pressure isn't really on me as much to be super interesting. People are watching the video for the product. So the pressure, I guess, is on the company to make an interesting product, but I'm pointing the camera at it. And I guess it helps that the videos are crisp and we love high quality production.

That's what we try to do really well. But as far as the quest of making a video we'd want to watch, it's like the gadget is the star of the show. And we're just doing our best to make it feel like you've seen it through the video. So after you graduated college, it was clear to you that this was going to be the business you were going to pursue, which was MKBHD. It's your initials in high definition, right? Right. That's what stands for. Yeah. And, you know, you thought, okay, this is starting to take off. By the time you graduated college, you already kind of a YouTube celebrity, you already had a relatively high number of followers. Not like today, but, you know, 2015, you already had quite a bit of attention and you were reviewing the new iPhone. and so on. Was it clear to you like, okay, I got to figure out how to make this into my profession, my business? Yeah, it was luckily a pretty perfect curve. So on one hand, I'm going to school. I have class every day and I'm playing on the ultimate Frisbee team and I'm doing videos in my spare time. But as you mentioned, like, yeah, I've been making a lot of videos and putting a lot of time into it and really enjoying it. And it's got an audience to the point where it does make money through the YouTube partner program. At the same time in parallel, Stevens Tech Pre-Technical School loves its relationships with tech companies all over the world, but especially in New York City.

So they've built these curriculums to where students specifically will do a semester of class and then do a semester interning at maybe a potential future company they'd work for. You know, there's lots of them in New York City. And that was cool. And so I started my semester of school, and then it came time for me to do the break semester internship. and the only thing I wanted to do during that semester was just pour more time into making videos because I enjoyed making videos so much. Yeah.

And so every time I did that, I got a little bit of a taste of what it would be like to be a full-time video creator. So by the time I graduated, it was both making enough money and obvious enough that, yeah, this is what I want to do when I'm done with school, that it was kind of a, yeah, it was a no-brainer to turn it into what I pour all my time into. so that's exactly what happened. How did it work? Would these companies send out sample products to get reviewed?

Like at this point you were getting some attention from people who were interested in technology. So did you start to get flooded with stuff to review? Yeah. So this was early enough that I wasn't like flooded necessarily with stuff to do videos on. But it was a pretty steady stream of interesting stuff happening to talk about, interesting devices to try that I could make a video about. And I'd graduated from my $5 a week allowance or whatever to now actually the YouTube partner program existing, which meant that based on the size of the viewership of a video, you'd actually get paid a little bit for people watching the

videos. So this was a, it was a hobby, but it was also a hobby that was paying, which was pretty cool. Yeah. And yeah, this was like the beginnings of relationships between, media companies and online video creators super early. And the revenue was coming entirely because you were getting a cut of the ads that YouTube was playing before the videos. Exactly. Yeah, the partner program, they'll show ads on top of videos, maybe right before videos. More recently, there's mid-rolls. So in the middle of a video, an ad might pop up. All the sorts of built-in tools that YouTube's given creators over the years were all contributing to a pretty steady income to the point where like it was making full-time job money by the time I graduated.

At the time, how long would it take you to make a video? Because you're setting up trip and, you know, you want to write a nice script and you want to edit it together nicely and you were a student. So yeah, roughly how long would it take you to make a four or five minute video? Yeah, man. So I'd say if you pick like a standard like gadget review, you know, there's obviously a test. period like I'm using the device I'm actually going through writing things down and taking my notes on it but I guess just for production sitting down

talking to the camera and then editing I could probably do an entire video back then in a day maybe I had class end at 2 p.m. and I would I would just work on it for the entire rest of that day until midnight or something and then post the video and that would be my day that process has evolved a lot since then but things get more complicated as they get more intricate. But yeah, I think around a day for a video. Wow. And you were, I mean, you say you were making like equivalent of a full-time salary. So I'm curious, more than $100,000 a year? Not yet at that point. So I think I was more just like, oh, I can pay my rent and buy food and have money to reinvest in the business. So probably like 30, 40 grand, something like that.

And how many views were your videos getting in 2014, 2015, when you're in college? Back then, I'd be estimating, but I'm going to say probably every video is getting anywhere from 50,000 to 150,000 views just on a normal video, and it was a high enough volume of videos. Right. Okay. So you know that this is what you're going to pursue because you've got this niche. And when you graduated, how did you decide to think about this business? I mean, you know, did you think about, okay, I've got to hire people. I've got to have another camera person, or was it initially even after you graduated college, just you? Yeah, after I graduated was still just me. So basically the way I thought about it, and I've evolved the business part

behind the scenes of this operation very, very slowly and deliberately. In the initial years after I graduated, it was literally just, oh my God, I have so much more time. I just get to pour that time into making videos. Yeah. So here I go, trying to like learn new animation tricks and try new software tools and try to up my production. And it went from me doing videos in my spare time and maybe doing one or two a week to me not having class every day and getting to do three, maybe four videos a week or up the quality, do three videos a week, but way better videos. Yeah. So that's initially how I started thinking about it. And of course, you could twist that into a business move and say, I'm building an audience that way, specifically by making better

videos. But the whole like, you know, scaling and building a team thing was not for many years after that. You know, what's remarkable to me is that this is all self-taught, because you can go back and watch your first video, and obviously it's not a high-quality production. It's a sweet kid talking to the camera, and it's like a FaceTime video. And then you compare it to what you do now. It's just remarkable. But what's really remarkable to me is that your scripts and just your delivery was so crisp. I mean, today, of course, too, but even back then, who was giving you feedback? I mean, was there anyone that you could go to and say, hey, what do you think about this video? What could I improve? Or, like, how are you able to do such a good job just on your

own? Yeah, I guess that is part of the beauty of YouTube, which is, I guess if you're an artist and making anything, you scroll back far enough, you start to cringe at your own work because you can see your own improvement work. Yeah, yeah. But the other part of YouTube is like, the second I upload something, there's immediately hundreds and hundreds of people watching it and giving their open, honest feedback in the comment section of things that they enjoyed, things that they liked from the last video, things they want to see done better. And I made it a point to like listen to that feedback and continue to not just make videos I would want to watch, but just try to make better videos, period.

Right. I did have some other creator friends and I think everyone kind of builds their channel a little bit differently, so it's valuable to hear from other people and how they do it. But yeah, yeah, I think honestly you just look back at what you used to do. and try to do that 3% better again and again and again and again. And that adds up to pretty big improvement over time. Tell me what was the turning point? What enabled you to go beyond just you making videos

and starting to bring in one person, then two people, and then more? So I think the beginning, the genesis of building a team anyway, was I'd gone to CES a few times, which is a consumer electronic show in Las Vegas every January. And Las Vegas is always just like a chaotic, like running around, trying to see what you can see, make some videos. And I'd always had my slow methodical process in my own studio, so I was super out of my element.

And I think I got back from a CES one year. And I texted my friend Andrew, who had played a lot of Frisbee with. And I was like, man, it would have been nice to have someone like, I don't know, carry the cameras and like point the cameras at me, make sure it's in focus. Like just someone to help me out with all that stuff. And we realized we should actually try that. And so he came out and helped out with a few videos. And it immediately made a ton of sense. I mean, he's super smart.

He has a technical background. He knows how to work with cameras. And so he was the first person I added to the team. And then it slowly just started growing from what do we need standpoint. And then I have my whole octopus analogy. I don't know if you have time for how crazy my analogy gets. Please. I describe the team building act of a YouTube creator.

like an octopus cutting off its arms. Hmm. And I say that because when you're a creator at a certain level, you realize you actually have like many jobs, seven, eight, nine jobs. You're a camera person. You are a writer. You are an editor.

You are a full-time in front of the camera person. You are managing the inbox. You are the financial accountant. You're doing the taxes. You're doing all this stuff. Right. And wouldn't it be great if you could just cut off one of those arms that's doing one of those tasks and hand it to someone,

who is 10 times better at doing it than you are. Or maybe they're just twice as good, but they have way more time to just do that all the time. Yeah. And so for me, that was a no-brainer. It's the camera person? Yes, of course.

The accounting. Yes, of course. Cut that off. And slowly you are able to build a team around you of people who are able to make everything you do way better. And that's a win for everyone. That's a win for the audience. That's a win for us.

And then the last part of the analogy is, I don't know if you know this, An octopus has three hearts, and a creator does have to find at some point what those hearts are, what those activities are, what those things are that you can't really cut off and hand to someone else to scale for you. Yeah. So for me, I found out that that's the voice I have. That's obviously me being on camera. It's a little bit of content strategy, a little bit of the writing and things like that.

Those are the hearts that we keep core to every operation. but the arms have been chopped off and handed to people way more talented than me. So that's how it's been built. How many people are on your team now? Right now, so it is up to 13. So I guess a little bigger than an octopus. Yeah. So it's interesting because it's the, Paul Graham calls it the maker versus manager dilemma, right?

Because you are the face of MKBHD, right? And yet you're also, I'm assuming the CEO of their business. I guess so. We've never called that, but I've heard a lot of people describe hierarchies as like a flow charge from top to bottom. The way we've built it, it kind of feels more like a hub of a wheel where everyone talks to everyone, but I think everyone does talk to me. But you have to not only be on camera and be the brand of what you do, you're also in meetings and you are in conversations around potential deals or agreements and business development too, right? Right, exactly. So I'm in the inbox. I am making all of those decisions about what we end up spending our time on. Yeah, there's certain things where you can maybe not cut the arm off, but have someone help you with those choices or like streamline it or filter through things to make that process easier. But yeah, at the end of the day, everything does still go through my own judgment as far as what channels we operate and what things we put on those channels. I wonder as you start to really blow up, right? You went from hundreds of thousands.

to millions of views, you must have had a lot of big tech companies saying, hey, you know, we'd like to work with you. We'd like to partner with you. Hey, we're Samsung. We're Apple. We're LG. Like, hey, why don't you be our official brand ambassador? And I mean, that must have happened, right? Yeah. There's a couple of really interesting job offer type things that happened. One of them, yes, was what you're describing, which is, hey, come work for our publication. Like we've got a bunch of faces, we do a bunch of content, you can be one of them, and you'll be under our umbrella. And it was way past the point of me ever considering that. Like, that was not something I was interested in, especially because I had all the control of exactly what I wanted to do.

The other fascinating one was come help us make products. And I guess the other thing I found out pretty early in this job is that the authenticity and the unbiased nature of my reviews is the most important part of it. Yeah. And that felt like it would be pretty compromised if suddenly I could only, you know, speak a certain way about a certain company because I work with them. Right. So that was also a pretty quick no. So I was able to figure these things out pretty early in the process. So help me understand your revenue model. Is most of your revenue still coming in through YouTube ads? It is a pretty big chunk. I think it's the second biggest chunk, but it's technically all under ad-supported free content. So we have the YouTube

ads, but we also will sell our own ads. So you'll see something like a sponsor inside of a video, things like that. Those two things are, yeah, easily the biggest sources of revenue for the business. And do you read ads yourself? I do, yeah. Yeah. And that's a huge part of why they're so successful is we get to be really picky about what we do custom ads for, because, again, we're not in a position where we need to do a ton of them. Right. And so anytime we do, a lot of weight goes behind it, and the audience really knows that that is something I actually care about and use and trust and like. Yeah. And, you know, when I review a product objectively, you already get that sense of whether I like something or not. But now if it's me working with a company and exposing it to my

audience, like that's huge for the company and that's huge for us. So we get to work really hard at making what we hope is the best sponsored integrations in these free videos that we make. And I'm curious, what do you do if you're reading an ad for a product he really like? But then there's a product that comes out from that same company that you really don't like, and you are going to review it. What do you do? That's a great question. So normally we don't do sponsored integrations from companies whose products we also review,

and that was a choice that we made pretty early. But we have actually had like that happen with these sort of fringe overlaps. my job is to be completely honest in the review and any compromise of that honesty is pretty obvious because you know there's other people reviewing the same phone if I leave something out that's bad like everyone's going to notice yeah but you know that cannot and should not hurt my relationship with any sponsors or any companies because I'm just being honest about the product I think it always comes down to being completely truthful about it and the crazy thing is maybe it's not crazy but me being honest about the product to spare

what's bad about it, actually helps those companies. Hmm. Because they actually get to know what's bad about their products and fix it for the next time. Yeah. I mean, I have to assume that, and again, not to disparage any YouTuber, I think the most successful ones are incredible entrepreneurs, but the ones who aren't doing review videos who are making videos really about themselves as the main character, some of them are making $30, $40 million a year, in part because they are taking in, most every opportunity coming to them. And again, I'm not judging it. It's just that they have made that

decision to do that, to kind of be spokespeople for whatever products and brands and to do all kinds of bespoke videos. I have to assume you guys are leaving a lot of money on the table by not doing some of that. Oh, yeah, 100%. Yeah. I think we probably, I couldn't even tell you how much, but yeah, we say no to 99% of the things that we get offered. Wow. Like actually 99%. So much respect for that decision, but from a business perspective, given that you have 13 people, and I know you're one of the top YouTubers, so your revenue is still high, but given that you've got a team and, you know, there's a potential to make lots more money, how do you resist that? Yeah, I guess thankfully, the business is in a position where it makes enough money to sustain

and make extra on top that we get to reinvest in the business, which is already pretty visible. Like, we buy equipment all the time. We have this crazy camera robot. Like, we're trying to do fun things in the video production world. And so that means we just get to be really, really critical at every single decision that gets added on top. It's also like an audience expectation thing. Like what does the audience expect when a new MKBHD video gets uploaded? Well, they definitely expect high quality production.

They definitely expect honesty. They expect a tech video. And maybe sometimes there's an ad in there. It's not like there's an ad in every video. But if there is an ad in the video, it better be. good because, you know, there's lots of other terrible ads out there on YouTube and we're not really into watching that. So we try to find those things in the inbox that actually are a win for everyone involved. It's like a cool product or something that we were going to do a video

about anyway or it's just a fun video to make. And so we can we can pick and choose. Yes, we do leave a lot of money on the table, but that's not really a problem in the situation we find ourselves in. We'll be right back in just a moment and when we return more from Marquez Brownlee on how he's navigated the quickly evolving creator economy over the past decade. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm talking with Marquez Brownlee, the creator behind the tech-focused YouTube channel, MKBHD. So give me a sense of the big picture. So you've got the main tech review channel, but you also have an interview show. You've interviewed Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Kobe Bryant,

and you've got merchandise. Give me a sense of the whole business. Yeah, okay. This is fun for me because I haven't actually broken it all down and described it all. So the hub of it all is the main YouTube channel, the MKBHD YouTube channel, as you referenced.

And that is a bunch of tech videos about tech things that I'm interested in. That actually has different little playlists, little buckets of content. Some of them are reviews. Some of them are impressions videos of me getting my hands on something for the first time. I have a playlist called dope tech,

which is just the craziest bleeding edge. tech. We have the interviews as well, which are super fun. That's all main channel. But we also have a bunch of other YouTube channels. We have a podcast that we do every week called the Wave Form podcast. We have the studio channel, which is a sort of a behind the scenes, little peek behind the curtain, was it a Vaz style of like how we make videos, what it's like at the studio, you know, video tips and tricks, equipment, little mini reviews by people in the studio, things like that. Then there is the autofocus channel, which is a branch off separate channel just for car stuff, because I've had a lot of cars come through here, and they're basically gadgets at this point. So that's

the YouTube world. The podcast also has an audio-only version. There's also a merch store, and it's just generally like we have this one cool space we all work out of, which I'm trying to turn into like the ultimate video studio. And then we're just constantly making stuff that we think is cool that deserves to exist and that's sort of the main operation here. You know, there are some reviewers who are just mean and harsh and maybe with good reason. You are not. You are really respectful and even when you're criticizing a product, you do it in a very respectful and nice way. Do you ever find yourself getting criticized for being too pro tech or two sort of not critical enough of tech companies? A little bit, yes. And I think there's two main,

responses that I can point to for why it might seem that way, which is, one, we only have so many hands, and we only get to make so many videos every year. Yeah. And so we do actually have to make a choice sometimes of what do we make a video one? Like there's seven new things that came out this week, and we only have the bandwidth to maybe cover two of them, or maybe we collect a few of them into one video, if it makes sense. And so some things just get left out, and it's often the things that we're most interested in or that are the best products that we end up wanting to show and try and make a video about

and cover and review. So that's one. And then on the other hand, it's also like, again, you know, going to a tech school, but also talking to the people that work on these products. What I've actually understood is a lot of them watch the reviews. Like they work on the product for months and months and they do their best work and then they turn it in and then it gets absolutely torn apart on the internet by everyone who doesn't make products. And so, My goal is actually to help make a decision for people thinking about buying the thing, but also to help make the next version of the product better by giving actual, like, real feedback on why something's bad, not just saying it sucks and I don't like it.

And to give like that sort of pointed feedback, trying to give other examples, because that is part of the audience, actually, it turns out. And I think that actually helps towards making it digestible. I've heard a lot of feedback from product managers and engineers at various companies who said, yeah, I watched the review and we fixed that in the next one. What about, like, criticism? You know, especially in the beginning of someone's career, when you get people saying mean things to you or discouraging things, like, it can really be, you know, difficult sometimes.

Were you getting any meanness and nastiness? And if so, how did you deal with that? Yeah, no, definitely. I've always had at least some percentage of people just not like anything that I do or post. I think for me it comes down to being able to specifically separate founded criticism and like real constructive feedback with just like baseless random attacks, which both of them will happen. But you know, you might see for example like, you know, the lighting in these couple shots was really muddy. If you'd shot this in a better lighting environment, you know, that's not hate. That's not someone just like spewing like criticism just to make you mad or something.

that's actually, maybe they watch some other videos with better lighting, and they're just like tossing their two cents in. Right. And then you see a comment that's just like, I don't like your shirt or I don't like the way you talk or something like that. Like that sort of stuff, I read all the time and have to know to separate from the actually useful advice because it's not really useful. So I guess I've gotten better at like developing that filter internally over time and

I just know one feedback, especially, you know, you read something and you know, like if someone's right, then it hits the hardest. Like, yeah, you read comments about how you could have done something better and you know yourself, like, yeah, I really could have done that better. So you figure that out pretty quickly. Yeah. Was it hard for you to get comfortable in front of the camera? I mean, your first video was you in front of the camera. And again, you're just, you're so different from so many YouTubers in that you're very self-effacing and just really nice.

And I wonder whether it was natural for you, felt natural for you to be in front of the camera. No, I never quite feel. feels natural, I guess. I will say it is a learned skill. Again, like you watch a video from two, three years ago, at least from me, and it's like, wow, who is that? What are you doing? Like, it's hard to watch the older stuff. But yeah, I think I've gotten better at talking to a camera. I've also gotten better at editing me talking to a camera. But it never quite gets natural to like edit your own voice, hear your own voice, edit your own face. I guess I'll say it's a learned skill. It's something I've gotten better at intentionally over time, but it's, you know, it comes with the job. So I'm willing to do it.

Tell me about sort of where you go from here. You know, what is the vision? I mean, because I'm sure you've had all kinds of people giving you advice, saying, you know, Marquez, you got to bring on investors, you got to blow up, you got to be doing live shows, you got to have a book, you have an imprint and a publisher. I'm sure you've heard all these things, right? You've got to have your own cryptocurrency, put out your own coin. You know, what do you want to do? What do you want this to be? Yeah.

I guess I have two main interesting things. One is the now and one is maybe a little bit further into the future. But the now for me definitely is to make, we're still trying to optimize making videos that we want to watch. And then I guess in a bigger sense, making channels that we'd want to subscribe to. I spent a lot of time on YouTube. I really only watch YouTube videos.

I have a Netflix account. I don't remember the last time I logged in. I watched just tons of YouTube. so I really enjoy like finding a good YouTube video, a good YouTube channel. So we're just trying to make that happen. And then the natural progression, which is really interesting, is after you've seen so many products, especially a bunch of tech products,

it becomes a really interesting part of the job where you have all this context and you get to compare all these things. And then you eventually just want to make a thing that like is the ideal version of what you've been reviewing this whole time, which is like that's a whole whole whole. other process, that's really difficult. But it is always on the back of my mind of like, obviously products are fun, but my audience has grown to understand my taste and that I clearly like a certain type of thing. It's probably a pretty high quality thing, high quality materials. And so

working on a product that falls in line with that seems like the sort of natural progression from someone who's reviewed so many things. To make something. Exactly. Do you know what it would be? I don't know yet. That's the golden question. That's the one that I don't have people in my ear about. Like I hear all the stuff you're talking about. Make your own coin. Make your own go write a book or something. I don't know. There's cool. Don't make your coin. No, yeah. Please don't. I don't. I don't plan on a coin. But some sort of tech product would be really, really interesting to me. And I know how much work goes into those. So I know that there's a pretty big undertaking there. Marquez, I'm curious about the time and preparation you put into what you do. You're doing a lot. And I mean, I do a lot. And I, there are days where I just, I want to curl up into a ball and just put the covers over my head because I get burned out. You know, there's some weeks where I'm doing 10 long form interviews a week. And there's a lot of preparation that goes into every interview. We try to know as much as we can about every guest. I can't imagine how, I mean, do you ever get burned out by all?

the things you have to do? No, and I think I'm lucky in that sense, but it's also because, again, I'm a product person. I, like, really like tech and I'm interested in tech. Yeah. So it's kind of like, yeah, the tech keeps itself interesting all the time. Don't get me wrong. It's challenges and, like, man, this watch came out. And I want to find a creative way to explain how I feel about this watch, but I just don't

know how to say it. And I'm just sitting on it for days. And then suddenly it's like, wow, it's been out for a week or two. And like, I still haven't said anything about it. And I don't know, maybe this just does in the video. That can be frustrating. And that's a feeling that I'm sure a lot of other creators have. But I feel pretty lucky that, like, there is just a constant flow of interesting tech happening.

And luckily, we get to choose exactly what we make all the time. So whether it's a car or a phone or a pair of headphones or the laptop I'm talking to you on right now or the microphones, like it's kind of always interesting. So that's pretty sweet. I wonder, there is an element of feeding the beast of just constantly having a new thing available and a new thing available. And I don't know. I wonder whether at a certain point it becomes like something that you'd want to just not do that often. I mean, do you imagine that at some point you would want to kind of get off the hamster wheel of having to make new content all the time? Yeah, I've thought about that a bit.

I think it's funny because it's not like the pressure to make. make new stuff comes from like the algorithm or some like hamster wheel where everything will die if we don't make another episode yeah it kind of comes internally from ourselves like we're always out here with ideas of like oh you know it would make a good video and we just want to make stuff all the time yeah and we actually kind of have to trim back in the opposite direction of like look if we try to make all of those videos this week we're going to be insane we're not going to sleep so we got to pick and choose our battles here but yeah i think in a super long term, it does make sense to like figure out what an appropriate pace of output is that is

actually long term sustainable. Yeah. I think our rate right now is pretty good. It's maybe a little high for super long term. But again, I'm having fun with it. So hey, why not? But yeah, that is like a back of the mind decision that I guess I'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

But it's like we have the pieces of the team here. We can turn down or turn up output if we want at any point. during the year. So we think about that a little bit, but as of right now, we feel like it's pretty good. You're like now an old timer, even though you're so young, right? You started out so early in YouTube. So you have the advantage of also having a legacy audience. Very different landscape today. A lot of competition, you know, many millions of YouTubers out there. Is it, in your view, possible to gain a mass YouTube audience starting out right now today?

It definitely is. The way you do it is now definitely not the same as it used to be. That's a pretty key thing. I was just at the YouTube Creator Summit, which is like a gathering YouTube puts together of a bunch of the top creators and then YouTube executives. But basically the point is like you're in a room with the top 100 creators of North America.

Pretty much everyone is recognizable every year as I'm in those rooms. Yeah. And I was just at the 2022 creator. Summit and probably half the room was faces I'd never seen before because out of nowhere YouTube shorts came along and there are people who are just making short form vertical videos, 60 second videos and just blowing up zero to four million subscribers in a year. My kids watch it every day because we don't allow them to watch TikTok and now I realize they just started work around us to go to YouTube shorts.

It's basically the same thing. It's everywhere. It's YouTube shorts. It's Instagram Reels. It's all over the place. that's one way to blow up and actually find a meaningful audience. It's different from the way it used to be. And so there will be different versions of a long-term legacy-built-in audience for those people in 10 years.

And we'll just find out when we get there what that looks like. But yeah, I do think to answer the question, yes, it is still possible. It's just different. Can you be like Marquez-Rown-Lee and still find a mass audience? Or do you have to swallow tide pods? You got to swallow tidepots. No, I'm just kidding. No, it is different.

It's different because I'll rewind a little bit. It's funny. I've noticed that in a lot of these like poles of younger people, you ask them like, what is your dream job? What do you want to be when you grow up? And it would always be like firefighter or like, I don't know, movie star or something like that. They all say YouTuber now. That is fascinating to me because when I started, that did not exist. So the Marquez that started making YouTube videos and poured it.

thousands of hours into something just because that that video deserved to exist was not like feeding an algorithm trying to turn it into his job. That's a very different thing. Right. So the hard answer to your question is, I don't think you can do it the way I did, the way I started in 2009. I don't think you can do it that way anymore. Hmm. I do think if you're after a certain thing, which is turning into your job, then there is a level of like, okay, having to understand the dynamics of the algorithms and the business and how YouTube works. But I also think it's kind of like a sport where you might not be able to turn it into your job, but if you do enjoy like playing, you know, basketball in the park or whatever, then you can just have fun playing basketball in the

park. And hey, if someday it's your job, great. But if it never is, you're still having fun playing basketball in the park. Fair point. Fair enough. And by the way, we even even mentioned that you are also a professional ultimate frisbee player. Yeah. That's like a different podcast episode. Marquez Brownlee, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. This was fun. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab.

Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at guy.org. If you want to contact the team, our email address is hibt at ID.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Rumtin Arablui. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Josh Lash, Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, and Carrie Thompson.

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