From MrBeast To Big Brands: Why Top YouTubers Are Hiring Paddy Galloway

Over 5,000 creators are on his waitlist. His clients tally up over 700 million views per month. He’s gone from making videos about MrBeast’s historic rise to working for MrBeast himself. It’s clear Paddy Galloway offers something special as a YouTube consultant.

While he started off making video’s breaking down the success stories of creators such as Casey Neistat, Peter Mckinnon and Mark Rober — distilling advice through simple drawings and animations — it’s now the creators who are hiring Galloway who today has over 440,000 subscribers himself and recently launched YT Jobs with co-founder Sina Sahami to help even more people get jobs in the creator economy.

MrBeast, Jesser, and Noah Kagan are just a few of the creators who have tapped Galloway’s knowledge and experience. His content creation philosophy boils down to a delicate balance of studying your niche while still innovating it. I had the chance to sit down with Galloway at VidSummit and he shared three crucial lessons for creators to thrive — and there’s no waitlist to hear them.

1) Know Your Niche

Galloway’s creative process begins with two simple questions: “who’s our viewer, and what sort of videos do they like?” Galloway told me. “A lot of people try to put across what interests them and that’s important, but so is what interests the viewers.”

While this might seem obvious, it’s often forgotten. Galloway accomplishes this by studying the existing niche of a creator, both through their videos and others in the space. This is when those hours of binging your favorite YouTubers finally pay off.

“It’s a simple question of, what are the five or six best performing videos on this topic? Could I make them again in some form?” Galloway said. By studying these top-performing videos, you’re able to identify the key elements that make them successful and then apply to your own content.

Consulting for Jesser, who recently won the Streamy Award for Best Sports Creator, Galloway did exactly that. Studying Jesser’s channel, his video titled “Going to 3 NBA Games in 24 Hours” stuck out to Galloway as a hit in both views and concept. Naturally, Galloway suggested Jesser turns it into a series.

Of course, that didn’t mean just re-creating the same video over and over, as an audience will quickly grow bored. Galloway emphasized the need to put a twist on each installment. For Jesser, this meant playoff games instead of regular season, or eight world cup games in 100 hours.

“I saw how well the three games in 24 did and I was like, five in 50.” Galloway said. “It can kind of go infinitely like that.”

2) Explore “Blue Ocean” Ideas

While Galloway sees repeatable content as an essential tactic for creators, he insists creators leave room for continued innovation. Sometimes, the best ideas pop up as those random shower thoughts or a funny remark in your YouTube comments section. Galloway calls these “blue ocean innovation” and recalled having a eureka moment when starting his own channel years ago.

“I think the videos on my channel were pretty novel. I was looking at a lot of YouTube advice content and I was like, this is really good information, but it's presented quite in a quite boring fashion,” Galloway said. “ I’m not taking shots here, but like some of it was just very technical, very pragmatic, which has its merits, but when I do it, I want it to be entertaining too.”

Galloway’s blue ocean innovation came when he pushed the boundaries of YouTube advice content by turning it into a new kind of animated, deep dive, breakdown format. “I saw other niches, like video essays around engineering and science and thought to combine them together. And that’s where the spark came,” Galloway said.

One of the first times Galloway experimented with this format was his Peter McKinnon deep dive video, uploaded over five years ago.

He looked at McKinnon’s early videos and compared them to his more recent ones. Then, he took stock of everything that’s changed. He told the story of McKinnon’s career evolution in a way that hadn’t been done before — as if he were there, walking him through it.

Blue ocean ideas can come through a combination of existing ideas, as with Galloway, or they can stand out completely on their own — as with Ryan Trahan’s penny series, where he survived on one cent for 30 days.

3) Word Choice Matters

Ideas are only half the battle though — the words you choose to convey your ideas can be the difference between a viral hit or a misunderstood flop. Galloway understands this more than most.

Since Galloway doesn’t actually appear in any of his videos on screen, instead using a blank white board aesthetic, his word choice is what propels the story forward. This means Galloway will obsess over creating the perfect script for his content. A 10-minute video often translates to 50-100 hours of writing.

Galloway once even spent a week writing and recording 12 versions of a video’s intro — only to scrap them all as it didn’t mesh with the video itself. Point being: your first draft can always get better and so can your twelfth.

In his experience consulting, Galloway found the biggest mistake people make with their word choice, especially for intros, is an over-reliance on fluff. He encourages creators not to be scared to lead with tangible numbers, instead of unnecessary context.

Working with Noah Kagan, the founder of AppSumo, on an intro, Kagan’s draft started with a question: “what if I told you that you could start a business in a weekend that could go on to be really successful?”

“And I was like, ‘I started a 200 million dollars business in one weekend,’ just giving that punch straight away,” Galloway said. “I think some of it comes [from] people not wanting to be too bragadocious, but with YouTube … you need to be like, bang!”

Even Galloway’s classic title format, ‘The Man Who Broke YouTube,’ is intentional. After seeing a title in the Wall Street Journal that read “The Man Who Solved the Stock Market,” Galloway thought he could adapt it for YouTube. Drawing inspiration from it, he brainstormed ‘solved YouTube,’ ‘beat YouTube,’ and finally landed on ‘broke YouTube.’

It can be challenging to put yourself in creators’ shoes unless you’re a creator yourself — which Galloway is. It’s why his waiting list is over 5,000 people long and he can charge up to $1000 per hour. Galloway’s clients come to him because they know he’s not just a consultant, but a creator who truly understands the ins and out of the platform and how to make a channel stand out. With his unique approach, Galloway’s advice “broke YouTube” and continues to help others do the same.

Special thank you to VidSummit for hosting, Ricardo Ramirez, Alessandro Bordoni, Samuel Flores and the Richy Films team for helping with the interview shoot, and Chloe Ginsberg for helping with research and preparation.