Is MrBeast Burgers peak influencer or just the beginning?

So, welcome to 2021 where a 22-year-old YouTuber with no expertise in catering or food delivery can launch 300 restaurants across the US with zero marketing budget and be so successful that the ordering app can immediately jump to the top of the app store.

In today’s 100 Innovations per Hour episode, I’m discussing the phenomenon of MrBeast Burger and I think it’s an important indicator of things to come. If you think we have reached peak influencer, I don’t think we have even scratched the surface, in years to come this sort of launch will seem everyday and standard.

In this article, I’m going to look how we got here and where we might be going next.

How did we get here?

5 years ago this was impossible. If you wanted to launch a chain of restaurants you needed huge resources and financing, the marketing budget would be huge. In fact, I can’t think of a comparable launch where 300 locations were opened same day out of the blue. What happened?

Five huge trends have enabled this and it’s worth considering each of them:

1. YouTube Explosion — A few months ago, I hadn’t heard of MrBeast (I’m not the target demographic) but he has over 50m subscribers and was the second highest paid star on YouTube in 2020 earning $24m. It’s incredible the economy of YouTube and the reach of it’s biggest stars.
2. Rise of the Influencer — It’s not just about reach though, the fact is that consumer spending behaviour is increasingly influenced by celebrities that they follow with YouTube and Instagram leading the way.
3. Dark Kitchens — or Ghost Kitchens is the phenomenon of restaurants being set up solely to service food delivery apps and often with multiple brands operating from a single location.
4. Food Delivery — It’s hardly news that food delivery is booming with apps such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats. I think we are approaching a tipping point where food delivery may overtake in-home cooking as the most popular way of eating in major cities.
5. API Businesses — As per this post from the excellent Not Boring, the other factor enabling this is that you can outsource huge swathes of business with relatively simple software integrations. So things such as payments, which used to be hard, are solved for you with a couple of lines of code.

However, have we reached the peak? It’s a type of narrative fallacy to believe that we have come as far as we can and the story is peaking. But we might just be starting.

And therefore what lessons does MrBeast teach us for a future where they look back at this launch as ‘quaint’?

1. Brand is everything. This isn’t entirely new, Tesco sell mobile phones and insurance without any particular expertise, just a brand. But in this new world, you don’t even need to be a huge company to have a brand that works.
2. Young stars with trust will win. In fact, big companies are going to lose out to new entrants such as this. I bet McDonald's didn’t have MrBeast as a potential competitor!
3. One person unicorns. Again, quoting Not Boring, you don’t need to employ people to run a massive company. How much is MrBeast’s business worth today? It’s not a billion dollars yet but then he’s only 22 (just starting). I wouldn’t bet against him building a unicorn media business. Whilst he’s not a one man operation, he certainly won’t carry the overheads of old $1bn media corporations.

I genuinely think that we are seeing something happening that most people (me included) can’t comprehend and we won’t know what to think when the wave hits.

Until then, I’m waiting for MrBeast Burger’s UK launch 🍔

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