How MrBeast Built Feastables in 90 Days | Ben Acott, Feastables Founding Team

0:00And we didn't have too much direct access to Jimmy early. and I'll never forget like Jimmy was that we launched and it was a huge successful launch we broke Shopify records we were out all night like you know two or three all-nighters in a row just to try to like get it ready in time because we had Jimmy's main channel video announcing the launch of Feast of All's dropping we could not change that day we were so far behind but we thought fuck it let's just grind hand coding Shopify themes no real time for QA it was just like go time but yeah it was just it was just that that chaos of that fast pace but Jimmy didn't give us too much love and he said to me, let me know when you've hit 100 million in revenue and then I'll give you more time.

0:38Welcome to the Hot Start 3C podcast, the show where we break down how celebrities and creators build billion dollar brands. In today's episode, I'm joined by Ben Acott, a founding team member of Feastables, the chocolate company he held launch alongside Mr. Beast. After helping scale Feastables into one of the fastest growing creative founded brands in the world, Ben went on to start Magnetic Labs, a venture studio and fund built to launch iconic consumer brands with top creators and celebrities. In this episode, we will talk about how he got recruited by Mr. Beast to build Feastables, what makes creator and celebrity founder brands succeed, and how the playbook for building companies with celebrities and creators is evolving.

1:14So without further ado, let's get into the conversation. Ben, I'm excited for you to be here. Thank you so much for being on the show. Scott, it feels like a long time coming between the team this up, but yeah, super excited to get into it with you. Yeah, 100%. Well, before Before we talk about Feastables and the work that you're now doing with Magnetic Labs, can we talk a little bit more about your background? Yeah, man. Well, I've been building companies now for 20 years. So I dropped out of school when I was maybe 16. Mom bought me a computer and I locked myself in a room and taught myself how to code.

1:43And then just naturally people came to me to say, hey, can you build a website? Can you build me a MySpace page? And just did that. Eventually sold that company. So grew it back in maybe 2002, 2003, sold it. There was a social media agency like back in the day before MySpace. It was very much like built on IRC and platforms like that. Went to work for Facebook for a while. So it was one of the first employees in Australia and the APAC region building out the ads platform and building, you know, consumer brand experiences in the very early days at Meta or Facebook back then. Built an e-commerce company from the ground up to about 100 people full time.

2:17Had a big exit or relatively big exit at the time to a big CPG company. ever since then just got addicted to building brands that just were a little bit different that sort of intersection between cult community and then just a really good solid products market fit just that intersection of those three things it's always been been a passion naturally from that you know joined the the manscaped guys early you know back in sort of 2018 I think I got served an ad and it just made me laugh so fucking hard so I reached out said hey I need to join you guys And that was probably one of the first bigger subscription e-commerce brands that were the definitive like bleeding edge of cult and community and humor, talent.

2:59And yeah, that company is still flying. You know, it's been, you know, eight, nine years now and it's still continuing to blow me away. And then, yeah, after that, that's when the Feastables thing happened. So I got a phone call from Reed, Jimmy's manager, I think at the time. And it was just like, I think he was a fan of manscapes, like go to market and marketing and just how we kind of leverage the talent and the humor angle. And he just said, hey, let's go build. So jumped in and joined what was to become Feastables. Yeah, I love that. And obviously, like the first initial persons of the chocolate bars are here.

3:31So, yeah, like what was it like? You get a phone call from Reed and like were you already familiar with who Mr. Beast was like because he was obviously not as big as he is today? And what was the initial vision of the founding story of Feastables and what attracted you to it? Yeah, man. Well, I think, first of all, I had definitely heard of Mr. Beast before by way of my boys were just obsessed with content back in the day. Not much has changed. They're still massive fans. But that was the first big fact check from my perspective of just like, hey, boys, who is Mr. Beast? And they were just like, holy shit, dad, you have to do this.

4:03I was so used to running my own thing. So it was like a big decision to do that. But ultimately, what got me is at that time, I was obsessed with the concept of linear commerce. So it's building community into commerce and just making sure that those two things like align really well. So that integration between products market fit and then the community that you already have established. So it was very much the early, early days of like the creator CPG scene. I thought if anybody was going to see a multi-billion dollar exit with Jimmy's reach, it was going to be, you know, a Feastables or a candy bar play.

4:35But ultimately what got me over the line was Jimmy was building a chocolate factory already before the concept. and Feastables was sort of out there as a way to pay for the video. It was just like, shit, we need to, you know, we need to build something here to help pay for the big cost at that time of building a chocolate factory from scratch. So that was the mission. So I jumped in, I think it was maybe November 2020. It may have been and built that thing, hand-coated everything. It was myself and a few other guys and, yeah, knocked it out of the park within like 90 days of building. Crazy. Can you tell me more about those early days?

5:08Like what were the initial learnings of working together with one of the largest creators of this world to build a brand together? And we didn't have too much direct access to Jimmy early. And I'll never forget, like Jimmy was, we launched and it was a huge successful launch. We broke Shopify records. We were up all night, like, you know, two or three all nighters in a row just to try to like get it ready in time. Because we had Jimmy's main channel video announcing the launch of Feastables dropping. We could not change that day. We were so far behind. But we thought, fuck it, let's just grind.

5:36Hand coding Shopify themes. no real time for QA. It was just like go time. But yeah, it was just that chaos of that fast pace. But Jimmy didn't give us too much love. And he said to me, let me know when you've hit a hundred million in revenue and then I'll give you more time. And so what that forced us to do was build a brand that dug very, very deep into the DNA of who Mr. Beast is. We jumped into his YouTube analytics and understood retention very, very quickly. We understood thumbnail iterative split testing and applied that to every step of the business. The hypothesis was that if we could get the DNA of the Feastables brand right, leveraging all the data that we had access to, of which there was a ton, then there would be a closer success or a better sort of creative product fit, as it were.

6:21But yeah, we didn't get too much access to Jimmy. We got to 100 million. He was flying us everywhere and coming to 7-Eleven pitch meetings and he was all in. Yeah, I love that. And do you think that that should be kind of the blueprint on how these talent that brands are built more of like leveraging the talent as an accelerator instead of like making sure to leverage the talents to get that initial product market fit? Well, at the time I was like, dude, we've engineered this entire thing to be leveraged off the back of one of the biggest creators on the planet. But what it did is it forced us into a framework of how to build a brand first, how to understand the market, how to achieve double digit market share from, you know, 150 year old company like Hershey's and how to build something, a scalable entity without having too much.

7:03I mean, the unfair advantage was we had a main channel Mr. Beast integration. It was hard to see a path to failure just off the back of that. But to answer your question specifically, I think it's a really great framework to go into launching a creator brand by removing the creator themselves in terms of the reach proponent, but actually going deeper into the DNA, the data and understanding them and their audience as best as possible. I love that. And Feastables, like what initially was the launch version of Feastables is not what to Feastables yesterday. So it pivoted a couple of times, focused on like different product, different messaging.

7:37So Kay, tell me more about that. Man, the great thing about Jimmy is he levels up every year. And so that means level up the brand, level up the products, level up the talent, the resources around him. He just keeps on sort of notching up time and time again. The first version of Feastables was highly scrappy. I mean, I look at the bars behind you now and almost cringe when I see the on-pack display and how that showed up. I cringed at the four ingredients now because kids don't want fucking healthy chocolate. They just want the best tasting chocolate on the planet that is the most comparable to the product that they already love in the market.

8:12In our case, it was Hershey's. So we made a ton of mistakes, but it was down to speed. We really engineered the Feastables brand in like a three, maybe sort of four or five month sprint from scratch. So of course there's going to be mistakes made at that level of scale. but what we did is we spent a lot of time reflecting on 12 months of data reviews market feedback both from retail and DTC and engineered that second iteration of what Feastables became which is a much better product I might say but I think it's just nature of the beast man you just you move fast break things completely launch something that's never been launched before with a framework that's never been done before just you know focus then on the iteration phase Yeah, and this is what I really love about Mr.

8:53Beast. He's able to use his analytical frameworks to also apply it to a chocolate bar. So he often talks about going into Walmart to look at the shelf space, to see what it looks like, and leveraging those insights to come up with a better product. He's obviously very entrepreneurial. He has co-founded several companies. He recently raced at a$5 billion valuation for his holding company. So can you tell me more about what makes Jimmy special as an entrepreneur? Yeah. He's an animal in every sense of the word, in terms of just both his clarity, decision making. He is one of the best decision makers I've ever met in terms of just like under pressure and at speed.

9:30A really great example of that. When we just launched in Walmart, we launched national. Kids were completely demolishing the shelves. Like even, you know, that one they were buying it, the two they were just trashing the whole candy aisle. There was broken bars everywhere. It was a shit show and so what we did we just put our cpg brains on as operators and we're like well let's go and engage a you know a merchandising company and if there's four thousand whatever it was walmart stores and this is going to cost two you know 250 000 to fix the shelves and it has to be done every week jimmy's like fuck that i'm going to send one tweet and i'm going to offer 10k to one person if they fix the shelves take a photo of before and after that thing is solved and sure enough within 24 hours shelves were perfect that's a really good example of just like not worrying about how things have been done and then just this new breed of thought and thinking behind it we would never have come up with with that one he knows his consumer his audience and his community better than anybody he knows that one tweet can solve very very complex issues and we definitely leverage that across across the board but he is such a great curator of ideas but then has them banked and stored so whenever he needs to pull one of those ideas or concepts out and apply it to any one of his businesses he does so i love that example because like so many times people whenever they refer to celebrity and create the founder brands they often say oh the main benefits is only to build an audience and while obviously that's massive there's so many other benefits it's like being able to ask your audience to clean up an aisle in a supermarket that's crazy nobody thought about that so yeah i love that example so like you are on this rocket ship of feastables but then eventually you decide to leave to start magnetic labs so what sparked that decision and what is magnetic lapse yeah i just love the early stages of figuring out products and you know cult-like obsession and i think i did maybe two and a half years with feastables it was at that point in time when we started to bring in the i wouldn't say the boring guys but the guys from like the incumbents where it's just like okay let's build out a you know multi-billion dollar candy you know product and it's less about the stunts and the spectacles and more about the you know the operational infrastructure things like that so for me joining or starting magnetic was really a tip of the hat to those early stages of what we did with feastables how do we build very complex operational heavy consumer products and brands at scale as a process with integrity of the creator the celebrity top of mind and so i just love that early stage that zero to 50 that zero to 100 million dollars where before you even launch you're building a hundred billion dollar company, both operationally brand, mechanically formulation, customer experience.

12:05It's all very much well-fetted. So Magnetic is a venture studio and agency where we only work with talent, content creators across the board, either wanting to deploy something in the CPG space or looking to make an acquisition or an investment in one. So two very different paths to market. One, create and start to invest in Accelerate is kind of the sweet spot of where we kind of build. In terms of headcount, we lean very much on the build side of things. So we're natural creators. We've got a full content studio, a big operational team. A lot of the guys from Feastables are now with us at Magnetic, and we just love to figure it out.

12:45I would say, where are we at now? We're like four years after starting Feastables. We are saying no to probably 90 % of the talent opportunities that comes our way. And that's just purely, you know, creator or celebrity integrity is the most important thing. So it's in our best interest to say, look, it's not the right time, not the right product, not the right fit. What we see is that can this creator or celebrity pull double digit market share from a really boring category? Or how do we introduce this new community into a boring space? And they're the things that we kind of flag or look for.

13:15Earlier this year, we launched Willie Nelson's cannabis beverage company, Willie's Remedy. That was an example of the most perfect talent with the most perfect timing of a product and a space and the category evolving. And the two of those things. And then just deep passion on our side, just with cannabis in general, just a perfect fit. Those three things really kind of like struck gold in our opinion. That was another one where it was like November, the phone call happened, and then we launched by January. So it was effectively two months of engineering, product formulation, regulatory, understanding the whole compliance landscape of THC and cannabis.

13:50all the way through to a big direct to consumer and then content strategy off the back of that. So all hands on building is a good sort of sense of what we do within the magnetic engine. Yeah, very interesting. And I actually love that you mentioned that you say no to 90 % of the opportunities because I also always say is that most of the celebrities of creators shouldn't even be launching their own companies. Also for every like skims or for every feastables, there are hundreds of failures. So it's really about finding those one or two that are really can become like billion dollar opportunities instead of trying to launch like a 50 million dollar company or whatsoever.

14:25You recently wrote on LinkedIn that the playbook for like companies like a Feastables, like what worked in 2020, doesn't work anymore in 2025. So the new celebrity founded brands or the new creative founded brands, they need to apply a different type of playbook. So can you tell me more about what that first playbook looked like than what is needed in today's world to succeed as a creator or celebrity founder brand? The moment came, I think it was like the eighth week in a row where we saw another creator launch. And then I'm starting to follow the numbers deeply in terms of loss ratio to creator versus non-creator in the consumer space.

15:02The numbers now are relatively consistent or the same with creator-led brands' failure rate versus non-creator-led brands' failure rate. So I started to just think through that a little bit and just started to understand the evolution of what we had back in 2020. I think Prime had just launched around then. Feasables was obviously coming through. I was starting to go through, even in retail, a thought process of do we need another face or creator or celebrity to tell us that we need this particular type of toilet paper or a commodity product that really doesn't really add value. What I was seeing then across like 40 to 50 different creator brands on the Shopify side was obviously first purchase, super easy, no paid.

15:39It was all, you know, organic, one tweet, you know, one post, whatever it was. But retention rates were just incredibly, incredibly poor, often because product was skipped. It was all about your cash grab off first purchase and not really giving a shit about retention and engagement and subscription. So it really sort of changed my thinking to one, start with a product that is going to change the world to a brand that can speak on its own that can still have its own voice its own stunts its own spectacles its own magic moments and then three then how does the creator kind of layer into that so ultimately the best example of a creator-led brand right now is one that the creator actually looks forward to going to work with and that could be a stunt or it could be a spectacle or an IRL experience whatever it looks like but making it really fucking fun making them look cool is kind of like the big thing here and then underneath that is a product obsesses over customer experience and taste and you know formulation and can really kind of stand on its own so the big thing here is just taking a breath and obsessing with a product and brand and going back to old school advertising tactics of it starts with the creator obsessed over the advertising and the creator connection and then that just makes it a really fun destination to bring talent into we always say is that the best celebrity brands are always product first and ever celebrity first and what we also see is there's kind of a second wave of celebrity and creative founder brands now rising.

16:58Whereas like the first wave, they're really focused on like another commodity product. They slapped their name on it and they tried to sell it for twice the price. Whereas like zero to non-innovation. Whereas now the second wave, they're like launching innovative products and services that solve real customer problems. And they also have a certain advantage around product, IP, science, or even technology. And celebrity is just one of the ingredients in that equation. So that's definitely something that we observe as well. Unfortunately, that's not the case still for many of these celebrity founded brands.

17:27So why do you think that still a lot of the celebrities and creators launching new brands are kind of applying that first playbook that was actually successful in 2020? Likely bad operators behind them pitching them really, really terrible ideas without too much sort of data. I think that's probably the thing. And it's always interesting and compelling when you're comparing a paid post or an influencer deal to say, hey, instead of that, we can build this thing in 90 days and launch it with an average co-man and just grab the cash. But I think the thing that lacks there that isn't often explained to celebrity is the impact on them and the integrity of them and their community.

18:03That's the thing that I care most about. I think, you know, you take that away from talent. It's just embarrassing and it's just not a nice experience for their community. The product will die. Your community will be pissed off. Just feeling like crap in general. That's even more profound when we see like equity crowdfunding deals that are talent-led as well. I cringe every time I see one because it's just more often than not that than not it goes bad and it's so fucking public. So it's probably a combination bad operators and just really bad management on their side. On the smaller like, you know, influencer guys, you know, doing like a Pop Rocks product that's a once off as part of a campaign, go for it.

18:36But, you know, that's not what you and I are here for. Yeah, no, it's funny. I actually wrote an article last week about like the crowdfunding of these celebrity brands. Like, why would they even do that? I never understand that. Like so many people always comment, like, why is a celebrity that has like tens of millions of dollars trying to raise like$50 from their fans? So, yeah, it doesn't make any sense. I'll send you the article after. On paper, it's interesting, though, because it's like the ultimate form of like community engagement with your fans of just like own the company with me and we'll grow this thing and you'll be a part of it.

19:04And I think that tokenization of an exchange is interesting. But the concept of creative products does just that. You know, people weren't buying chocolate when we launched Feastables. they were buying the ticket to the spectacle the carnival then ultimately access to jimmy it was like we're in a freaking chocolate factory even without that it wasn't that it was just like that street cred or showing up in the schoolyard repping feastables back in the day like that was the ultimate flex and so that that transaction only has to happen at consumer level but i do understand like the path there like there is limited exit opportunities or liquidity opportunities for talent when they when they when they start something like this often it's it's um obviously we've seen some great exits in the past, but most likely it never really will end in a large scale transaction if the brand has been built around the profile.

19:48So that kind of like, you know, public IPO or crowdfunding can make sense, but it should happen much, much later in the mix. I completely agree. Once the risks are kind of like diluted a little bit, then it's like maybe fair to do. And it's funny because Mr. Beast even put out a tweet like in 2022 or 2023, I don't remember anymore saying something like i'm thinking about ipo and feastables and beast burgers early on so because i think we can 100x our revenues and i want to share like the profits with my fans and although like let's say he would have done that and the investors who invested in feastables would be very happy the people who invested in beast burgers wouldn't be you know so it's just a massive risk that they take on in case it doesn't work out i can still see a world where Jimmy IPOs, either Beast Holdings or Feastables independently.

20:34I think that would be just such a magic moment for the industry, but for him as part of his path or trajectory of whatever he's building next. I think having a big billion dollar IPO would be just insane. No, 100%, but that's definitely going to come a lot later when the company has matured a lot more. So yeah, let's talk a little bit more about celebrity and creative founder brands in general. How do you leverage a celebrity or creative co-founder to start a skilled company? Well, it's obviously reach and then just leveraging the thing that makes them magic, the thing that makes their fans love them, and then just building creative around that.

21:07I think that's the mix of it. It's very rare that they're going to provide strategic input on products and formulation unless they come from a deep, you know, either passion or experience. So it's really about the magic of compelling people to drive awareness and then drive conversion off the back of that. It definitely helps on the retail side. you can kind of almost bypass that blueprint of DTC into retail. You can often unlock retail a lot, lot earlier, although we don't advise it. But it's really just like, you know, what is the magic that makes them them? We dig into either appearances, things that they're known for, and then craft experiences off the back of that.

21:43So that would be 99 % of it. But, you know, the Willie Nelson thing is interesting though, because there hasn't really been too much input on Willie's side. that name, that like evangelism of weed and anti-alcohol kind of culture that he's kind of instilled for 50 plus years now, since the seventies. Sometimes it's just leveraging the persona and the brand and the feeling that, you know, these guys give. Yeah. But I think it's the times where they come in, creators or celebrities come in too early as CEO or some kind of C position where it comes off a little bit cheap or can I trust this? This guy's known for, blowing buildings up.

22:21Can I eat his candy? Things like that. Yeah, that makes sense. So in the marketing, how do you decide when and how to leverage the celebrity and how that person should appear in the marketing and storytelling versus letting the brand and the product speak for itself? Testing the crap out of short form to make impact or make decisions for you, I think, is the strong point for all of our brands. So we're constantly producing 20, 30, 40 pieces of short form content per brand per week to know what hits. And then off the back of that, we'll then bring the talent into that mix and then reshoot a bit more polished production and put media behind it off the back of that.

22:58So short form iterative testing is kind of like how we, one, build a product. Sometimes we don't know what we're building. So we'll craft, you know, 10 to 20, like fake concepts all the way through from a social profile to a landing page. Measure things like in TED to buy, there might be like a$1, you know, pre-author, or get first access type call to action. And then once we kind of like iterative, like improve the process of what the actual product is, then we'll bring the talent into the mix. We always focus on creator product fit. And so sometimes we will start with the creator and then place them into like five different product categories and then test that through short form to then come out the other end.

23:35And that's not always the final answer. It's just a pillar of how we make a decision to say, hey, this is the right product category that you could potentially go after. And so we use that process more on the acquisition side when there's maybe 10, 12 e-commerce brands that we're looking to acquire and align or partner with talent off the back of that. Okay, that's very interesting to kind of reverse engineer the whole process and kind of like test it out with different markets and different products already before you launch. That's very interesting. And whenever you're partnering with such a celebrity or creator as a co-founder, what do you typically look for in such a person?

24:11Passion, creative, passion. they probably like the it has to come down to like hard passion for the space that we're going after because if you don't have that it's i mean you can pick it to bits and people can see through that within seconds of something launching and we've seen terrible examples in the past couple of years especially of just like this guy's never even fucking been in the space or even you know tried this product and it's just a cash grab so there needs to be underlying passion and then the passion then jimmy's a great example of this mr beast had no chocolate experience for the first couple of years the second that we started to understand supply chain child labor impacts operational complexities of running a chocolate business he was all in and just like you know for 20 hours a day he would just study and bring in the best industry people that he could just to just to learn from um that was there because he was genuinely passionate about the space that we were building inside so yeah the passion thing is interesting and then the creative thing is like understanding their own audiences so well that they know how to port that into selling a product If they don't have that, then it's just us force feeding like 20 different creative ideas and then they just pick one randomly.

25:16I don't think that's the right path. I think they need to really understand creative. Sometimes that gets a little bit challenging. Willie Nelson was a great example of that. He doesn't, you know, didn't want to know how to do it. I would say, you know, guys that are more used to heavy directing or script reading is, you know, answers great. But the guys that really understand who they are, who their audience is and the space because of the passion, they're the sweet spots that we go after. Yeah. And how do you validate that? And also, how do you validate that the creator is the right person for a specific product or a specific market?

25:46Bypass the management, get to know them intimately, just shadow them for three days. It gets annoying for them, but that's just part of our diligence process. We need to get to know them on a personal level. understand banter understand you know their sense of humor as an example or the things that you know makes them them it could be like what their you know daily process looks like their morning ritual their evening ritual like getting to getting to know them intimately is a really big superpower that we um that we always reserve the rights as part of our diligence process just then like digging into data if you know again if it's a youtuber we're going to get into their analytics we're going to get to know all the tests that they've performed how did they get to you know where they got to understanding retention drop off you know everything that is important to their business we apply to ours i always think it's also important that these creators or celebrity founders they have done certain tests in specific similar markets to understand if they have sellability like a great example is sydney sweeney sydney sweeney is reportedly launching her own lingerie brand and a lot of people would say yeah but the majority of our followers are male so i'm not sure if there's a perfect alignment but like two years ago or one and a half years ago she actually did the co-branded line together with Frankie's Bikinis.

26:50And it was the best-selling line they ever did. It sold out in 24 hours. And all these bikinis and lingerie is not the exact same product. It definitely shows that she has sellability in the market in a similar product. So I always think it's also important that celebrities or creators have done certain tests in the past, just so that we are able to understand, can they actually move product? Yeah, it's one thing to get the reach and awareness. It's the other thing to convert and then retain. And I think that's the secret sauce here. I think, I mean, Sydney is Sydney, basically sell anything. And it's, you know, if you're a dude, you love her.