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How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
211–220 of 1001 posts
Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
#212> Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success. You could say that about literally any shady business. Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did. Being monetarily successful does not mean you’re good or shouldn’t be criticised.
I'd love to see that document and I'm sure there's a lot to learn from it and a lot of knowledge to use for the good of humanity.
The fact that a shady business used some tactics to advance its cause doesn't automatically condemns the means.
Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is at least self-aware on that front: the first page says “Sorry in advance for all the run on sentences and grammar issues, I’m a youtuber not an author haha.”
That shows a total lack of self respect in my opinion. You don't have to be an author to put even the tiniest effort into your writing in a professional letter like that.
Modern culture is very big on self deprecation and not having respect for the tiny details. If you don't hold yourself to standards, you can avoid people dragging you when you fail to live up to them. Better to say "I'm not an author ha ha" and have writing full of flaws, knowing the only people that are going to give you grief about it are people that "take it too seriously", then to try and present a well edited and highly professional piece of text and have a mistake missed in editing become the focal point of a bunch of pedants who want to tear you down for being high and mighty. It's a balancing act to be sure, but that's the current side of the spectrum the culture trends are on.
Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
#214> Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success. You could say that about literally any shady business. Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did. Being monetarily successful does not mean you’re good or shouldn’t be criticised.
I'd love to see that document and I'm sure there's a lot to learn from it and a lot of knowledge to use for the good of humanity. The fact that a shady business used some tactics to advance its cause doesn't automatically condemns the means.
Most shady businesses can be boiled down to, “we exploit people for personal gain”.
Which is always bad.
Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
#215Lot 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…
I always love the "just hire A-players" line. As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice. And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.
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Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
#216I have kids and I'm really bothered by MrBeast. I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of him. I acknowledge he is creative and driven but the content is such crap, with a few exceptions that my kids point out. But, what's the alternative? For example, I love 3brown1blue videos. But, it is too advanced even for my eleven year old. Mark Rober videos are great, and my kids love them, but he's even insid…
>But, what's the alternative?
The alternative is grabbing The Little Prince or My Neighbor Totoro and watching or reading it with the kids. I have a very simple rule, if something isn't good enough to be engaging for parents and kids just throw it the hell out. It reminds me of a discussion between a Japanese coworker and an American expat. The Japanese guy was disgusted by lunchables, and the expat went "oh yeah, they're just for kids", and he just said "you feed your kids something you wouldn't eat yourself"?
Stop normalizing feeding garbage to children, metaphorically or literally. There's enough stimulating media in the world outside of Youtube.
Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
#217One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.
He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that.
I actually spent over an hour writing 750+ words of my takeaways reading this document and shared it privately with a few founder friends of mine and I briefly considered also posting to share with the community but I took a look at the comments and took a look at what I wrote and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings that are driven, at the end of the day, not by a genuine intellectual desire to reach an understanding, but by the need to prove emotionally that others are not taking this seriously so I don't have to either.
All I can do is be vague and say I think this was an enormously valuable piece of writing that is worth engaging seriously for what it is as it might change your worldview in several important ways.
But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN that makes it an extremely unpleasant place to hold a conversation and people reading should be aware of this systematic bias when reading comments here.
Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
#218This reminds me of how every corporation I've ever seen operates. Why is this strange or interesting?
Other corporations seriously have employee handbooks with sentences like this in? “… instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.”
They do, but usually you'll find it worded something like "Deliver high value, seamless and synerginized entertainment that frontalizes our strengths and inspires diverse modalities of consumer satisfaction"
Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
#219Lot 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…
I always love the "just hire A-players" line. As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice. And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.
It's more about willing to fire below-A players quickly rather than having a perfect hiring filter that only lets A players in.
Looking back at 7 companies I worked at: they all had a tough hiring filter to get in. But most of them also had not that great people that they were not firing.
Firing people is hard even when you know you should do it. You have to be a heartless bastard to not have a problem firing people.
It's even worse when the company gets so big that a game of building empires starts in which case managers have an incentive to grow headcount to grow power, even if that headcount isn't very good.
The document even talks about what MrBeast considers a B-player.
Made a mistake once? That's fine. Fuck ups are a price of ambition.
Made the same mistake twice? Need to be told the same thing multiple times? Not an A player so fired.
Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to see that document and I'm sure there's a lot to learn from it and a lot of knowledge to use for the good of humanity. The fact that a shady business used some tactics to advance its cause doesn't automatically condemns the means.
Most shady businesses can be boiled down to, “we exploit people for personal gain”. Which is always bad.
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