Topics · titles and thumbnails · the first 30 seconds · story beats · post-launch review
I tested every prompt myself
In September 2024 an internal production manual from MrBeast's company ended up online. Fortune and Business Insider both covered it and checked with former staff that it was real. Put the manual together with the principles he keeps repeating in interviews and the skeleton of the method is clear: decide the title and thumbnail before you shoot anything, then after launch watch two numbers, click-through rate (CTR) and average view duration (AVD).
I went through that public material and rewrote it in my own words, then broke it into 5 prompts you can paste straight into Claude. So what you are reading is a digested version, not a translation of the manual. I ran every prompt myself and only kept the ones whose output was actually usable.
Thumbnail and title first, video second.However good the content is, nobody clicking means zero. So the first test for any topic is: would a stranger scrolling past this thumbnail stop?
Deliver on the promise in the first 30 seconds.People came in for what your title promised. The faster you give them a taste of it, the more willing they are to watch the rest. Drag the opening out and they are gone in two seconds.
A small hit every 20 seconds, a big turn every 100 seconds.I measured three of his signature videos second by second. Small hits go down to an elimination count or a money reminder, big turns go all the way to swapping in a whole new game, and the two layers keep crossing over. A normal channel cannot match his production volume, so aim for a reason to keep watching every 60 to 90 seconds. An upgrade, a reversal, new information, a change of shot, any of them work. The point is to keep the “just one more bit” feeling going.
The five prompts follow a video's life cycle: pick the topic, sharpen the title and thumbnail, write the opening, lay out the pacing, review after launch. Swap whatever is in the square brackets for your own and paste it into Claude.
The method comes from public reporting and interviews (the Fortune wave in September 2024, and Passionfruit's verification piece). The words are all mine, not a translation of the manual. The prompts are original and they work whatever your channel is about. I also checked these three principles second by second against three of his signature videos (Squid Game 2021, lost at sea 2023, Olympics by country 2024): delivering in the opening and not dragging the ending were both confirmed, and the pacing one runs tighter in practice than the manual says.
And honestly: these five prompts give you a method, not a traffic guarantee. The other half of MrBeast's system, the hard half, is volume. He shot for more than ten years and made over a thousand videos before these principles came out of it. Tools save you some wrong turns, but you still walk the road yourself.
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I'm Leo Huang (kanisleo328), and I've built several products with AI. If this page helped, say hi on IG.
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