What actually makes a video go viral?
Jay Neo, a 21-year-old self-proclaimed “content nerd” who previously worked for MrBeast, YouTube’s most followed creator, has been obsessed with finding answers to that question since he was a teenager.
Neo spent his teenage years running Discord servers for games like Minecraft and creating short-form video content.
A key metric Neo was looking at was user retention. In other words, do people stay there for the entire video, or do they scroll away?
Neo said they meticulously studied the retention graph for each video to see where users were drifting away. Understanding how and why users scroll past videos can help creators stay on track for their next video.
Neo said his focus on retention helped him land a job at MrBeast at age 18, where he worked on short-form content strategy.
MrBeast’s goal post?
“We want to make videos that a billion people want to see,” Neo told Business Insider.
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One of the videos Neo worked on was “Would you fly to Paris for a baguette?” — Recorded over 1 billion views. In this short video, Mr. Beast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) asks someone if he can fly to Paris to bring back a baguette for $100. After the first person said no, he increased the amount to $300.
The escalating offer hook in that video is an example of a “stair step,” Neo explained. It’s a format that Neo and the MrBeast team tweaked to “beastize” similar videos popular on TikTok. That meant it had to be at least a little bit “ridiculous.” Neo said this led to a new formula for the Beast team, where someone travels far and brings something back.
“With Beast, and with everything I’ve ever done, we found a formula,” Neo said. Often, there was a lot of data behind the winning video formula.
After working at MrBeast and running other content accounts, Neo is launching a new AI startup for content creators called Palo.
Decoding algorithms using AI
Over the past year and a half, Neo and his co-founders Shivam Pankaj Kumar (who has held engineering roles at Microsoft and Palantir) and content creator Harry Jones have been building Palo AI, a personalized toolkit for creators. Creators feed their entire content catalog to Paro’s AI, and the startup’s AI analyzes the material.
Large-scale language AI models are “best suited to analyze every little thing, not to replace the creator,” Neo says.
The platform analyzes elements such as a video’s “hook” (the first few seconds that a viewer needs to be persuaded to continue watching) and “shows creators patterns in a simple way so they can make better decisions, make tweaks, and get more views,” Neo said.
The creator economy startup is coming out of stealth with $3.8 million in funding from PeakXV, NFX, EdgeCase Capital, and several angel investors including former MrBeast vertical platform head Rohan Kumar.
Palo helps creators write scripts, outline videos, and network with other creators. Courtesy of Paro
“The challenge today is that to keep up with the latest viral hooks and strategies to beat algorithms, you have to spend hours every day sourcing content for your brain to consume,” said Josh Constine, who invested in Paro through his fund Unexpected Investments. “Paro does the heavy lifting of research for you, allowing creators to stick to their craft without stopping the flow.”
Neo said the funding will go toward AI computing overhead and hiring engineering talent. Palo’s team of eight people work out of their home in Palo Alto, California.
The platform’s technology is powered by a “cocktail” of AI models, including OpenAI and Google Gemini. The product has been available to creators with more than 1 million followers, but Palo is expanding to include creators with more than 100,000 followers. Neo said the startup plans to introduce a $250 monthly subscription model.
Palo’s AI helps creators script short-form videos and outline content with storyboards.
The platform also has its own network, where creators can follow each other. Neo said the company plans to expand its capabilities there, including connecting creators in similar niches and adding tools to introduce creators to potential advertising partners.
While there are many generative AI startups available for content creation, Neo hopes established creators can use Palo to analyze existing content and make their videos break.
