Motivation Daily by Motiversity - The Crazy Job of Managing MrBeast | One of the Most Eye Opening Interviews Ever

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

The Man Behind MrBeast Reveals His Greatest Advice For Creators (MUST LISTEN)SpeakerReed DuchscherReed is the Founder and CEO of Night Media and the manager for the biggest creators in the world including MrBeast, Preston, and Dream.Follow Reed:https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedjd/https://www.instagram.com/reedjd/https://www.tiktok.com/@reedjd_Music:Epidemic Sound Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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New episodes are being released every week. The link is in the description. I think for Jimmy and I, we had never really envisioned how big this could be until we launched the business. And then a couple weeks later, we were like, holy cow, this is actually catching fire. The Mr. Beach relationship, it was a mutual introduction between a friend of mine, Jobless Garrett. He messaged me out of the blue one day.

Hey, I met this guy. His content is really interesting. I think you should meet. I was like, okay, sure. Send me his channel. And the first video that I watched was Jimmy spinning a fidget spinner for 24 hours. And he was just sitting at a desk. And that was kind of the first video I watched.

Thought it was incredibly strange. The next video I watched was him counting to 100,000, which was like totally legit. 99,000, 99. 100,000. This guy's crazy. I need to meet him just through Twitter DMs. And that's how Jimmy and I met. Jimmy and I clicked.

I think our obsession for the internet and YouTube just really allowed us to get along and kind of see each other. And I complimented him in an area that he didn't necessarily want to do, which was business and operations. And he's just so good at what he does in terms of video making and being a marketing genius.

And so it was really just a good relationship from the start. I really struggle with just being patient for certain things to happen, especially in my 20s. Like I was the type of person who thought I was going to find success early on and thought at like 24 years old, I would already have this, you know, successful job or successful business. And it takes time. It takes time to personally grow. It takes time to figure out what you want to do in life, what person, what type of person you want to become. And then like what's important to you.

And so I've had to, you know, probably. humble myself more than most people of just like being patient and just kind of like enjoying the journey in the process as like cliché as that sounds like I've found a lot of joy in the journey of growing this company over the last five years that I really just didn't think I was going to have in my 20s. My advice for creators starting out today is it is the easiest time to become a content creator right now and it's the best time for discoverability for any content creator starting out. I tell a lot of creators that are just starting out to really just like focus on short form to start kind of hone in on your craft

on youtube shorts TikTok now Instagram reels figure out like what that content is stay true to yourself make things that you're truly proud of and this is something that you know jimmy tells a lot of content creators is like your first hundred videos are going to suck so it's like once you get to that like hundred video go back and look at the first five and you're going to cringe at how bad it was And so you really have to focus on making each video better than the next. This is a long game. And if you're not willing to put in the time and effort, like just don't even compete because it is hyper competitive right now for attention.

You can go on TikTok or YouTube shorts and make 10 second or 15 second videos. And the organic reach of those is unmatched currently. I mean, just look at my TikTok, which like I'm not a content creator. But I have had multiple TikToks get 5, 6, 7, 800,000 views. just like filming a day in my life or talking about like here's the five reasons why mr beast is successful or here's like three ways that you can become a content creator it's hard to make a living just making 10 second tic talks not only is it incredibly difficult to monetize brands are just not as willing to sponsor that type of content as they are long form videos and so after you figure out

those first things that I said now start figuring out how you create maybe four five minute videos into 10 minute videos. So you can actually have AdSense and mid-rolls and you can do a 60-second brand integration, like things that are tried and true and working for a lot of content creators right now. And so hopefully for the content creators watching, like hopefully that's helpful.

And again, like each, each video you post, some you're not going to be proud of, but I think if you really focus on, I need to make a better video next week and the week after, like you're eventually going to get really good at that craft. it might take you years and Preston and Jimmy and typical gamer and a lot of these guys, they're on year 10, 12 of their careers. Jimmy's not on year four.

Jimmy was creating videos since he was 13 years old. It just took him a long time to figure out like what his style is and like what he actually wants to create. If you're not passionate about the stuff you're creating, you're going to get to a point where you just don't want to make it anymore. And I think like I've done a lot of thinking about creator burnout and why it happens and I think one reason creator burnout happens aside from the like they're doing everything they're the director of the producer the editor and like they have this creative fog that starts to happen after they

produce a lot of videos but a lot of times as well is like they just never loved the type of content they were creating maybe got forced into a niche because it started doing well and then they doubled down and then two years after they were like man I really do not like this type of content I don't want to wake up today and make this type of content. It's like you have to really enjoy what you do. If you enjoy playing video games and you can make that entertaining, start there. You don't have to just go trend hack and do something that's doing well for other people. For the first few years, it was mostly Jimmy. He had all these ideas on a whiteboard that he wanted to execute, that he had come up with, you know, over the last like six or 12 months.

And so still to this day, like he has all these ideas that he wants to execute. and a lot of them make for massive YouTube videos. They issue today is like the videos have become so complex and so expensive that they take months of planning to actually film a video. Like no longer are the days of like filling my friend's backyard with a million orbies where all you need to do logistically is like get a million orbies to North Carolina and actually put water on them to make them big and throw them in your friend's backyard. Like those videos like although in 2018, 2019 we thought were very challenging.

They were very easy to pull off comparatively to like giving away a chocolate factory and recreating squid game and all this other stuff that it's now come to. And yeah, I mean, the videos have just become so complex. And I don't see the stopping. Like they're just going to get more expensive and more complex as he continues to raise the bar. I used to think there was a limit like a couple years ago when he would post it. Like we did this video that it was can 50,000 magnets stoppable? And so the video content was not great, but the concept was amazing. It was like 50,000 magnets on a wall.

Can it affect a bullet or stop a bullet? And the video throughout the first like day did so well. I need to go back and look at the analytics, but I think it got like somewhere in like the 20 million views within the first 24 hours. To that point, we had never experienced anything like that. The video went on to get 60 million views over the course of a week, which is a of a week, which at the time, this was like 2019, like him and I's minds were just blown at how crazy this video did on YouTube.

And so I was worried back then, I'm like, where do we go from here? Like, how do you get more than 60 million views in a seven-day period? Like, that's never been done on YouTube outside of music videos. And so it's like something that I worried about a lot early on. And now I'm like less worried about it just because like I know the videos being filmed. I know the scale of them. I know what the next four months look like. But pretty early on, I had that worry is like, how does this continue getting bigger?

But now it's like after you do Squid Game and giving away a chalk factory and some of the stuff that's getting filmed right now, I'm like, this bar is just going to continue to go up. I had worked so hard to get an opportunity at an NFL sports agency for something that I thought I really wanted. You know, for multiple years, I wanted to work in an NFL sports agency. And so to finally get that opportunity, to get in the door, to start to make traction and to work with the people I worked with was incredibly fulfilling for me at the time. But I started to get this sense that the sports world was a little bit behind of where everything was moving. Everything was becoming more digitally focused. People were starting to make careers on the internet. I started to find Minecraft and Roblox and started to realize that like 14, 15, 15.

year old kids were making their own servers and monetizing their own servers and selling cosmetic items and so i started to see that like there's other creators that were gaining traction and especially in the video game space and so when i started night media i really kind of latched on to a lot of video game channels Minecraft and grand theft auto specifically so it's like typical gamer no j 456 pressed in plays of some of the bigger names now that people you know know like a typical gamer now is 12 or 13 million subscribers press in s 20 these channels were really small when I initially found them uh and so that's kind of how I latched myself into this business is like the dude perfect relationship and then kind of started representing video game channels and that's

when night media started in early 2015 and so my brain started to just kind of wrap its head around like all the things that were going on on the internet and all the businesses that were starting to be built on the internet. And so I got this like sense that I was being left behind and it started to give me anxiety. And I remember having this anxiety for months on end that I loved what I did at that NFL sports agency and I loved the work and the people I worked with. But I just for some reason, I felt like there was a bigger opportunity happening that I wasn't a part of. And so that's when I started doing a lot of this research. And I fell into YouTube and I started watching personality channels for the first time. I obviously had watched YouTube how to change a tire, how to fix this,

but personality channels, you know, this was 2013, I still had not watched personality channels. I didn't know they existed. And so once I found that, I kind of just went down the rabbit hole in a lot of these different channels. And so I then had to like have a conversation with myself of like, what do I want to do with, you know, the rest of my life? Do I, do I want to be an NFL sports agent, which is a grind in itself? And, you know, We were recruiting kids that went to USC and Alabama and Florida State and it's like you're constantly traveling and it's hyper competitive or do I want to go carve out this little niche for myself and something that I started to believe in, which was a dude perfect.

And so it was a hard decision. And I think for the most part, like I remember having this conversation with my parents and for the life of them they couldn't understand why I would give up this dream job at a sports agency to go really start my own business in Dallas, Texas, working with YouTube creators because it's just they couldn't wrap their heads around. Like how is this going to become a business? Like people watch channels on the internet and these channels make money. How do they make money?

So they couldn't really wrap their head around it. But I mean, I just ultimately like after thinking about it and after sleeping about like sleeping on the decision for a long time, I woke up one morning and I just was like, it's time. I feel in my like gut I feel like this is the right decision and I've always been a person where I like I trust my gut and I didn't look back I packed everything up I moved to Dallas I started my business which is now night media I don't regret it for a second but at the time like it was really tough for the first year and a half to two years when I tell you like people didn't understand it like I truly mean it it was hard to gain any type of traction within the brand and advertising agencies because they just, they didn't see the opportunity like I did. And I was pretty early to the situation or early to the, to the opportunity of brand sponsorships on YouTube. And so I just kept at it because I love it. Like, I truly believed in it. And I knew I could make a business out of this. But it was one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make is leaving that, you know,

sports world of what I thought I wanted to do and trying to like be an entrepreneur and start my own business. If you're really good at what you do as a manager, these relationships are going to last decades, right? And so if you're looking at it with a long-term mindset of, okay, this is a like a 10, 20, 30-year relationship, you need to really get along with that person and understand that person. And so a lot of the time that Jimmy and I spent together early on was just kind of asking each other questions and getting to know each other. And then I started asking him questions about like, what do you think of this video? What would you have done in this video? And so it was really just relationship building for him and I at that point.

I didn't, like, whether I represented them or not, didn't really matter. It was more like, can I get along with this person? Do we see eye to eye? Can we do business together? And that's kind of how we think about it now to this date. Like, Knight doesn't represent 400 people. We represent 30, maybe 32 creators. And we have deep relationships with those people because we take time to get to know them.

But we also understand, like, this is a long game.