The answer is, of course, ‘It depends’

On September 5, 2022, 24-year-old Jimmy Donaldson opened the doors of his first bricks-and-mortar burger location in New Jersey for the first time. And if Jimmy is to be believed, by the time they closed their doors that day, he had broken the world record for the most burgers sold in a single day by a single restaurant, eclipsing anything done by McDonalds, or Burger King, or anybody else for that matter.

But you don’t know him as Jimmy Donaldson. You know him as Mr Beast, an icon on YouTube, an empire built on a single personality, that has leapt off the laptop screen into the world of entrepreneurship, and seems to be doing pretty well.

His ‘Beast Burger’ brand has been rolling for two years, but never with a walk-in-the-doors physical presence. Rather, it’s an app that uses ghost kitchens to make and deliver burgers from 200 nodes nationwide.

It piggybacks on his personal brand, which he’s been building for over a decade. His main YouTube channel has amassed more than 100 million subscribers, with spin-off channels racking up fractions of that – still numbers that are the envy of much of the media world.

So when he set his sights on a burger brand, Mr Beast had a loyal following that were guaranteed to buy his product, and pull others along for the ride.

Bolstered by his vast following, the brand initially generated plenty of buzz and staggering sales. Within its first quarter, MrBeast Burger, launched in partnership with Virtual Dining Concepts, had about 300 locations available on digital marketplaces and hit its 1-millionth-burger-sold milestone. The brand swiftly became the most downloaded app on both iTunes and Google Play and was one of the top five most popular Google searches worldwide.

In other words, MrBeast Burger instantly proved it could find success without a prominent storefront or convenient drive-thru or hefty marketing budget leveraged by many of its global burger peers.

He built the Mr Beast brand first, in other words, and then built the burgers. Not everyone has, nor can they just go and build a brand at that same scale, but that doesn’t mean lessons can’t be learned by smaller-level businesses. Let’s look at Monty’s Good Burger, which only has five locations but punches above its weight.

Building a successful burger business ain’t easy. Building a vegan (yes, vegan) burger brand is a risky, expensive prospect. Building a vegan burger chain as your side hustle might seem even riskier again. But a group of people have made it look easy. And they’ve made it look beautiful, too. Monty’s Good Burger has thus been dubbed by the New York Times as ‘The Burger that Instagram Built’.

The founders of Monty’s were mostly involved in festival production - they were all working on Coachella, so they used their connections to create and trial a plant-based burger brand, which they sold exclusively at festivals. While tinkering and experimenting with the format, they continued pulling on every connection they had to try and post about Monty’s.

“We’ve treated Monty’s almost the way you would treat a young band that you found at a 300-person club that was selling out,” he said. “We didn’t put a lot of focus into trying to get the culinary world to love Monty’s. Our goal was to get musicians, skaters, people in fashion and dog lovers to love Monty’s.”

By the time they felt ready to open the doors of a real location, enough buzz had been created about the vegan burger concept that they had turn people away at the launch.

When Ms. Jiaras described the opening of the Koreatown location, it sounded more like a thumping nightclub. “There was a huge line to get in, Nic was working the door, I was making shakes, there were long days,” she said. “It felt like we were working a show.”

Building a business can be daunting, especially if you’re raising money to open the first of what you hope will be a chain, or if you’re going straight to opening a string of locations.

What Mr Beast and Monty’s show is that you can go about building a brand, and buzz, while you experiment with lower-cost models. Starting with the coffee stall before opening up the café, like CoffeeAngel founder Karl Purdy did in Dublin. Doing so means you get real customer feedback, experience of what works and what doesn’t and you have time to make mistakes with lower consequences and build up good faith and buzz before you make a bigger splash.

THE TAKEAWAY

• Whether you’re building a brand based on personality or product, working hard to define it and ensure it resonates is going to be a big part of your success. If you can find a way to operate as you test the waters, that feedback will be worth its weight in gold

• Working upwards from low-fi beginnings works. Aim for the stars but start by hitting the moon.

GO DEEPER

• Go behind-the-scenes at the Mr Beast burger launch