Former MrBeast content strategist is building an AI tool for creator ideation and analytics

Summary

Short videos are in high demand. Across large platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, users are watching billions of videos every day, with companies benefitting massively from this content explosion. For creators, this often means there is pressure to create more content than ever before to be relevant and make a living out of it, especially as more AI-generated slop is infiltrating these platforms. Jay Neo, a creator and former content lead for short videos at MrBeast, thinks AI can help creators understand what is working for them and also help them create new content ideas in that direction. That’s why, along with former Palantir engineer Shivam Kumar and creator Harry Jones, they are building a platform called Palo to aid creators. Shivam Kumar and Jay Neo. Image Credits: Jack Willingham Neo joined MrBeast at 18 to work on viewer retention. In a conversation with TechCrunch, he said that he became fixated with studying different metrics to understand where video viewership dipped. “I was so obsessed with retention graphs and figuring out why viewers stayed or why they left. I had a document where I noted all this down. Gradually, my role shifted to getting more responsibility around editing and ideation,” Neo said. Neo’s crowning jewel was a video where the creator asks people on the street if they’d fly to Paris to get a baguette, which garnered more than 1.8 billion views across channels. MrBeast ended up making multiple videos with this format. In 2023, Neo left MrBeast and started several channels under the “Creaky” branding with another MrBeast co-writer and scaled these to over a billion views per month. With these experiences, Neo understood there’s power in content formulation and analytics. During his time building Creaky, the team had multiple spreadsheets tracking different metrics around videos. At that time, one of Neo’s advisors suggested that he turn these insights into a product for creators, and he started working with Palo’s o...