📰 You’ve Met MrBeast, the YouTuber: Now Meet Jimmy, the Business Mogul

The audience for my free templates was happy to start paying for my new product

I realized that being Easlo might be a lucrative endeavor in fall 2021 when I began receiving tips of up to $100 on Gumroad. In November 2021, I decided to start charging for my new templates and turn "Easlo" into a business. I stumbled into this entrepreneurship opportunity; it was my first job ever.

To get the word out about my new, paid products, I sent an email to all the people who had downloaded my free templates. To my surprise, people started paying for my new product.

Gumroad made it easy to switch from free products to paid ones. I just changed the price from $0 to whatever I was setting it as. The paid template was profitable immediately, as it brought over $3,000 in the first month.

My audience came largely from Twitter, where I have over 211,000 followers, and Product Hunt, a website that elevates new software programs. My Notion templates performed well there, drawing tons of new customers to my website.

Running a business alone can be stressful, but I take pride in it I'm a one-man machine, which can be stressful sometimes, but I take pride in that every template, tweet, and Product Hunt post is designed and implemented by me alone.

I've never paid for an ad campaign. I focus on growing my online audience organically. I invest a lot of time in growth on Twitter, which has brought me the greatest return on the investment of my time.

Step #1: Find Untapped Video Keywords When it comes to YouTube, video keyword research is SUPER important.

In fact, choosing the right keyword can make or break the performance of your video.

For example, one video from my channel ranks #1 in YouTube for “YouTube Views”.

YouTube SERP – SEO And largely thanks to that #1 ranking, that video generates over 30k views every month.

SEO for beginners – Video views With that, here’s how to find keywords for your YouTube videos:

First, create a list of “Seed Keywords”

Seed Keywords are terms that describe super broad topics.

For example, if you were in the digital marketing space, your Seed Keywords would be things like:

Social Media LinkedIn Marketing Facebook Page Content Marketing See how that works? These are broad topics that you can create videos about.

Now, to be clear:

You’re not going to optimize your videos around any of these terms (they’re too competitive).

But a list of Seed Keywords is super helpful for the next step.

Next, type your seed keywords into YouTube search

Now it’s time to turn a seed keyword into dozens of long tail keywords.

How?

YouTube Suggest.

This works just like Google.

Pop a Seed Keyword into YouTube…

…and check out the keywords that YouTube suggests.

YouTube star MrBeast (a.k.a. Jimmy Donaldson) has always had a knack for entrepreneurship. He started his first business as a teen and doubled his investment with his first sale when he started a side-business selling digital items for the video game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO).

“My mom probably doesn’t like this story, but I used to play a lot of CSGO back in the day…so I would buy Counter-Strike knives and then just resell them,” says Jimmy in an exclusive conversation with Shopify.

Jimmy bought the digital products for around $10 and resold them for $20, a sweet 100% markup. He admits he didn’t sell too many, but he was ecstatic to be able to make money.

Once his mom found out, she told him to quickly shut down shop, but the business lessons he learned from his first entrepreneurial stint stayed with him for years.

As of November 2022, MrBeast is one of the most successful creators in the world, with more than 109 million subscribers on his main channel. While millions know him as a YouTuber, he is also a shrewd entrepreneur and on track to grow a business empire. Over the past few years, Jimmy and his team have launched and scaled three businesses.

Being a creator has given him a competitive edge as an entrepreneur, says YouTuber Samir Chaudry, co-host of the channel Colin&Samir, a platform about the creator economy.

“I think that everyone is going to be very surprised at what creators like MrBeast can build, because of the mindset that we’ve developed around putting out our product [video content],” says Samir.

“Wherever we release something, we get an immense amount of feedback and data that we can take into consideration in the next launch of our product, which, for some creators, happens every day.”

Below, Jimmy shares insights on his entrepreneurial journey, from creating video game content in his bedroom to building multimillion-dollar companies.

Types of Ideas

According to me, there are three broader ways in which an Idea may strike you

1. Epiphanies - You randomly come across an idea and get fascinated by it. These ones are a result of your observations, thoughts and sometimes an amalgamation of both. These ones are largely solutions looking for problems but sometimes these are also the ones that become multi billion dollar companies.

2. Inspirations - You see something and you get inspired. In 2010s, Everyone was inspired by Uber to build an Uber for X - such as Uber for food delivery, Uber for Vacations and so much more. You pick an existing idea or a model and then apply it to a new domain or a niche. These work well only if the timing is right as such ideas may be cyclic.

3. Domain Expertise - You work in a domain for years, understand the value chain and solve a tiny or a big enough problem. In my opinion, These are the best ideas as you know the problem and you also know your customers well enough Having said that, no idea is good or bad - It is very important that you play with ideas because you never know what can change your life.