YouTuber MrBeast, also known as Jimmy Donaldson, announced a contest for small business owners based on Shopify. The contest, which ended on April 24 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern, was announced by the YouTuber on TikTok. The winner will get a chance to feature in one of MrBeast’s upcoming videos, fly to North Carolina headquarters at the expense of MrBeast and Shopify and win some cash prizes as well.
The American YouTuber started the hashtag #PitchMrBeast as part of his hunt for business pitches from small business owners. The winning rewards, Shopify and MrBeast believe should help the entrepreneur grow their online business.
[My new ideas] are usually just whatever interests me and whatever I think the audience will get excited about.
Jimmy Donaldson
The aim is to motivate local merchants who have just started an e-commerce business and without prior experience. MrBeast mentioned some conditions saying: all entrepreneurs participating in the contest must be above the age of 18, with their businesses based in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. He excluded states like New York and the Québec City of Canada.
The other condition that MrBeast put was that it should be “an existing consumer product business or business plan to sell a tangible product online”. Businesses in the planning stage were excluded from the competition.
“The list of flavors though Shopify and I are flying one entrepreneur out to North Carolina to meet me and to be in one of my next videos. Stitch this video by Monday, April 24 at 11:59 PM EST with #pitchmrbeast,” MrBeast said in his TikTok post.
Harley Finkelstein And MrBeast – The Ultimate Partnership
Shopify President Harley Finkelstein, who proudly calls himself a friend of MrBeast, posted about the same on Twitter. “The biggest YouTuber IN THE WORLD is looking for business pitches over on TikTok. One winner is going to get to fly out to meet MrBeast, appear in a video, and learn all about his business empire. What are you waiting for?”
The biggest YouTuber IN THE WORLD is looking for business pitches over on TikTok. One winner is going to get to fly out to meet @MrBeast, appear in a video, and learn all about his business empire.
— Harley Finkelstein (@harleyf) April 21, 2023
What are you waiting for? https://t.co/ArVzJV9ddp
“I wanna make a case study about the holistic execution of this partnership,” sponsorship coach Justin Moore said in a reply.
Finkelstein has time and again spoken of MrBeast and his promotions. In December 2022, when MrBeast climbed a mountain in Antarctica, Finkelstein was among the first few to share a clip from his YouTube video that shows him speaking of Shopify in high regard.
“Introducing Mount Shopify by MrBeast,” Finkelstein tweeted the video clip along with MrBeast’s tweet that reads: “After years of trying me and the boys finally spent 50 hours in Antarctica!! (the most remote place on earth) GO WATCH!”
In the video, MrBeast can be heard speaking of Shopify as “a platform that makes starting a business incredibly easy”.
“Shopify helped me provide a YouTube channel into a business. And they can do it for whatever you are passionate about. Like climbing mountains,” he added.
Success at 24
In November, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke heaped praise on the American YouTuber after Shopify published a blog post documenting his journey. “Hard to overstate the cultural impact MrBeast will have on the next generation of creators and entrepreneurs,” Lutke tweeted.
Finkelstein quoted Lutke’s tweet to praise MrBeast. Calling him an inspiration for a new gen of entrepreneurs, Finkelstein tweeted: “The fastest-growing category of small businesses: content creators. MrBeast is the blueprint for a new gen of entrepreneurs: build an audience, then launch a business. He’s the biggest YouTuber in the world with +100M subs and has scaled 2 businesses on Shopify. He’s 24.”
He’s constantly raising the bar for creators whether it’s through re-creating Squid Game in real life or paying for the eye surgeries of 1,000 blind people. He doesn’t really understand small thinking or complacency. I don’t know what he’ll do 10 years down the road, but I know it won’t be status quo
Mark Rober, Former NASA engineer
In October, MrBeast released 200 limited editions Beast socks on his Shopify store. Surprisingly, the stock went sold out within three minutes. Announcing the Beast socks’ arrival on October 5, MrBeast tweeted: “I just released 200 limited edition Beast socks! Get them before they sell out at my @Shopify store”.
Finkelstein confirmed in a reply that it just took three minutes for the socks to sell out. “Sold out in… 3 minutes? Incredible.”
100M Subscribers on YouTube
In August when Donaldson completed 100 million subscribers for his YouTube channel ‘MrBeast‘, the Shopify President praised MrBeast’s journey recalling that he had only three million YouTube subscribers when he joined the Canada-based e-commerce platform.
“Shopify is obsessed with entrepreneurs – Jimmy is one of the world’s biggest creators and one of the most epic entrepreneurs. MrBeast has been on Shopify since he had 3M subs on YouTube – and he just hit 100M. Congrats on 100M Shopify!!!” Finkelstein posted on LinkedIn.
Wow, this is huge🚨 @MrBeast just hit 100M subs on YouTube – one of the world's biggest creators and one of the most exciting entrepreneurs on the planet. He’s been a @Shopify merchant since he had 3M subs.
— Harley Finkelstein (@harleyf) August 5, 2022
Congrats on 100M @MrBeast!
Shopify 🤝 Creators
More to come 👀 pic.twitter.com/TZwkx4T2YP
For the recent competition, Shopify has selected a team of judges, who would help MrBeast take the right decision. The jury will judge participants on the basis of creativity, business pitch, the viability of submitted plans and the “quality, clarity and logic” of the products and services. The winner of the competition will be announced on April 28.
It is not the first time when MrBeast has done something like this. In October, he announced a competition for the best business pitches from Shopify merchants. Then, the reward was $100,000.
How MrBeast Uses Shopify?
MrBeast uses YouTube to share his creative content and Shopify to sell his merchandise and a range of chocolate bars. “If you have ever bought my merch or feastables, you have used it. I am forever grateful for them because I have been using them since we had three million subscribers. Shopify literally powers businesses,” he said in the Antarctica climb video.
“Shopify powers businesses in 175 countries. Starting a business can be scary kinda like climbing this mountain. But entrepreneurship allows you to wake up every single day and do what you love. So the risk is worth it,” the YouTuber added.
At the age of 24, Donaldson has scaled not one but two businesses apart from his YouTube business, using the Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify. He was a teenager when he started his first business. Initially, he was selling digital offerings 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,” he told Shopify in an interview.
MrBeast knew how to multiply money since the beginning. He invested around $10 in the digital products for the CSGO video game and sold them for $20. The sales volume was less but it motivated him to do more. However, when his mother found out what he was doing, she asked him to shut down the business immediately. That entrepreneurial stint was short but it helped him the most in his career ahead.
MrBeast’s 3 Businesses
MrBeast now has 109 million subscribers on YouTube and operates three businesses, out of which are completely based on Shopify. His current three businesses apart from YouTubing include:
- ShopMrBeast: This is the Shopify store, which MrBeast uses to sell his merchandise. Remember, the socks we mentioned above? Yes, they were sold through the same Shopify store.
- Feastables: It is another Shopify store operated by MrBeast. He offers healthy snacks on this online store. He introduced a new range of chocolates after crossing 100 million YouTube subscribers. “I have personally been using Shopify to sell merch since we had three million subscribers, which is crazy because we are on a 100 million. Now, we also use it to sell our chocolate bars and so much more,” he was heard saying in the video posted by Finkelstein.
- MrBeast Burger: It is a brick-and-mortar restaurant in in New Jersey. Earlier, the brand was used to deliver burgers to more than 1600 delivery locations.
Recent Success
Recently, Donald spoke at the Harvard Business School all about feastables, his business strategy, and the future of the creator economy. “Taught a class at Harvard which is funny because I dropped out of college after only two weeks haha. Also I swear I didn’t try to dress like Steve Jobs,” he said on LinkedIn.
MrBeast also made cut to the 100 Most Influential People of 2023 by Time magazine. “The best engineers I knew at NASA were the ones who could break a complex problem down to first principles. They could strip away the noise, reduce a problem to its essence, and find a solution. Jimmy Donaldson—known online by the handle MrBeast—is able to do that too,” Mark Rober, former NASA engineer and YouTuber.
“The path to making his videos go viral and dominating social platforms—including YouTube, where he has 140 million subscribers—is clear and obvious to him. Jimmy’s crystal ball is less cloudy than most people’s. When we worked together to raise the funds to plant 20 million trees and remove 30 million lb. of plastic from the ocean through the Team Trees and Team Seas campaigns, his optimism was infectious,” he added.
Creator Economy
MrBeast’s success on Shopify is a testament to the platform’s potential to boost the creator economy. For the unversed, the creator economy is a type of economic structure that allows content creators and social media influencers to make additional money using their product of creativity. Apart from making entertaining content for their viewers, they can also sell them their merchandise or promote someone else’s products on e-commerce platforms like Shopify.
“He’s constantly raising the bar for creators whether it’s through re-creating Squid Game in real life or paying for the eye surgeries of 1,000 blind people. He doesn’t really understand small thinking or complacency. I don’t know what he’ll do 10 years down the road, but I know it won’t be status quo,” Rober added.
Samir Chaudry, who co-hosts a YouTube channel called Colin&Samir, believes that creators like MrBeast have the advantage to sell online. “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,” he said.
“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,” Chaudry added.
Data And Analytics
MrBeast sees the primary reason for his success in carefully examining each video and discussing it with other aspiring YouTubers. He evaluates the data like bounce rate, most played video and the click-through rate of thumbnails. In the early days of his career, Donaldson used to spend hours on videos, analyzing them with his community of YouTubers.
The group was called Daily Masterminds and its timing was fixed from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.. The group helped each other grow through mutual learning, studying popular YouTubers and brainstorming content ideas. Donaldson doesn’t shy away from crediting Daily Masterminds for his initial success.
“[My new ideas] are usually just whatever interests me and whatever I think the audience will get excited about,” he said. The YouTuber now aims to match the interest of his audience with his merchandise. The content, on the other hand, is also audience-centric thanks to the analytics.
Feastables – Story of Merchandise
In January, MrBeast co-founded snacking brand Feastables with Jim Murray, the former president of protein bar company RXBar. “I was familiar with Jimmy through watching the launch of Beast Burger. I had caught the news of that, and I really started to understand what was going on in the creator economy,” Jim told Business Insider in an interview.
MrBeast has his office headquarters in Greenville of North Carolina. He has hired over 100 employees, which includes his mom, stepdad and a group of friends. Sometimes, they spent 16 hours a day in operations like thinking of content ideas, set building, shooting and editing videos.
Even though MrBeast is quite popular now, his team still put on 100 percent effort to make every like, comment or share count.
