How a Cold Email and a Startup Led Mateo Price ’21 to MrBeast

Before he joined MrBeast and helped build the most-watched YouTube channel in the world at over 440 million subscribers, Mateo Price (‘21) was a student founder at The Garage building a business out of one simple bet: creators should use data like companies do. 

This week, he returned to The Garage to speak at Family Dinner. Long after the plates were cleared, Price stayed nearly two extra hours as students lined up with questions about building careers in the creator economy.

“It’s funny, because the job that I have now has probably 10,000 times the impact of what my startup here did, but the highs and lows of being a founder are always higher and lower than when you are working at a different company,” Price told the Residents. “You truly get to feel the impact that you are doing, for better or for worse.”

At Northwestern, Price launched a creator analytics startup called Authentic Media Ascension, or AMA. He sent cold emails out to 10 of his favorite YouTubers, offering to work for free if they gave him a chance to prove he could help them grow by understanding their data like a business.

“I essentially sent the cringiest cold email imaginable,” Price said. “One person out of the 10 responded. He said, ‘Hey Mateo, I don’t really know what this means but this seems interesting. Here’s my number. Give me a call.’”

That one “yes” came from sports creator Jesser, now a YouTube star with over 35M subscribers, making him Price’s first client.

The business grew to become an agency supporting growth and analytics for multiple top creators, but as it did, Price faced a major roadblock: realizing he was building in too many directions at once. 

“You cannot build a company that is ‘nice to have.’ You have to build a company that people genuinely need. And I made that mistake all the time,” Price said. “I tried to diversify AMA with courses or software and I could not figure any of it out because I was building ‘nice to haves.’ When I just tripled down on what was working, lo and behold, things worked out better.”

That focus paid off. In 2022, AMA was acquired by Jellysmack, a SoftBank-backed creator tech company, in a deal that brought Price and key teammates into the company. After eight months, Price decided he wanted to get back to building. 

That is when MrBeast called. 

Price’s analytical approach from AMA translated well to his new role as Chief Strategy Officer for MrBeast. Some may find it surprising that every concept for a MrBeast video – from building Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory to recreating Squid Game in real life – starts with data.

“It is shockingly data driven. We have a tool that scrapes and tracks about 800 million YouTube videos looking for outliers. We then have an ideation team whose job is to be really creative and validate all of their ideas with data,” Price said. 

That combination of experimentation and process is now being applied beyond YouTube. The company is expanding into consumer products and beyond, creating subsidiary brands such as Feastables chocolate bars and expanding into streaming with Season 1 of MrBeast Games out now on Amazon Prime Video.

For students building inside The Garage, Price shared a final piece of advice, a perspective he wished he had internalized earlier as a college student anxious for structure. 

“I literally don’t know what life looks like six months from now, and I’ve grown to be very comfortable with that feeling. While it feels so productive to say ‘here is the three to five year vision,’ ultimately, it’s probably not going to materialize the exact way you think it does,” Price advised Residents.

“Focus on the now. Be able to zoom out and say, am I generally moving in a direction I find interesting and rewarding?’ If that answer is yes, great. Keep tinkering and iterating off of that.”