Chuck Moroze

At 16 I was working for MrBeast. How? In high school I ran a philanthropy organization that aimed to get students away from volunteering just for the hours, and raise money for local organizations through fun, event style fundraisers. 10k in fundraising later, I sent a cold email to the Chief Executive of Beast Philanthropy: Darren Margolias. I don't exactly know why he chose to respond, but I think I stood out because I was 15 doing something other people my age weren't, and that got my foot in the door. I am extremely passionate about what I do. Philanthropy has always been important to me and will always be a pillar of my life goals. Long story short, I ended up getting the licensing rights to use their logo for a Walk-A-Thon event. We hosted a decently successful fundraiser, got my hometown councilman to pull up, and got a few extra thousand to the charity. Nothing crazy, but a feat most 15 year olds never attempt. My passion for creating a better world and building for a better future was finally getting realized into actionable opportunities. Admittedly I was nothing short of lucky to be extended the opportunity to move to NC and join the Beast team: but I had to make it count. I joined Beast Philanthropy in 2023 and I starting working as many hours as I could, helped out at the warehouse as early as 6am, and volunteered for every opportunity out there. I wanted to help as many people as I could, and really prove to myself that I could make an impact if given the chance. I even started hanging out at the production studios and company gym which helped me build my network and expand my education in the creator economy. At 17 I returned after leaving high school early: and continued to meet insanely talented people and scale my learnings. At 18 I was debating between joining FT, or going to college. I was waitlisted by almost every university, but after fighting off the University of Chicago's waitlist, I decided the opportunity was hard to forego. After all, prestige is enticing: and UChicago boasts one of the most profound economics programs in the world: something I knew could prove lucrative for my own career, no matter what I did. But... UChicago had drawbacks. The prestige extends perfectly into the corporate ladder. The Goldman Sachs recruiters and flashy corporate events started to become overwhelmingly attractive. I poured my entire soul into building the perfect resume for finance recruiting. I started waking up at 5am to commute from Hyde Park Chicago to downtown to work at a private equity startup, and even worked a second job from 5pm-9pm at my school's alumni call center (where I was really just harvesting phone numbers of traders and bankers). It worked. By sophomore year I landed my "dream" internship on Morgan Stanley's elite institutional equities trading desk in NYC: a multiple 6-figure paying role straight out of college. Immediately after getting this security, I immediately felt demotivated and depressed. Something I had sacrificed literally everything for, a day later, didn't feel so enticing. The reality onset, far before I ever stepped foot into the role: this wasn't MY DREAM. My dream is to build, to help people, to create for the future. That's when I met my rockstar co-founder, an absolute unit in almost every programming language you can name: and yet a great people person and manager: Alexander Sabat. Sabat was working on the MVP of what we're making today, something that could predict the bad moments in your videos. As someone who had worked at MrBeast, I thought this was a fascinating technology and wanted to become a part of it. This was the second stroke of luck in my life: Alex invited me to become 50/50 partners, I'd handle distribution, he'd handle product and fundraising. And that's exactly what happened. 600k+ in funding started pouring in from SSG accelerator, the founders of Seamless, Nathan Yu, and a bunch of other private angels. The raise wasn't easy, like everything in life, but that's a story for another post. We moved FAST. And that's exactly why I dropped out of UChicago and left it all behind. Without much thinking, I reneged on my finance internships and dove head first into the startup space: 0 security in mind. Am I scared, realistically I should say of course, but I'm also delusional. I am too hungry, driven, and passionate about the content realm and the future of this world that I'm loving every stressful moment because I know the learning will be so valuable. Got a sickkk content/hacker house in Miami, Florida, and a killer engineering and marketing team. We're building addictd.ai, and for the first time: I'm coming in front of the camera, and making the world know who we are!

@__ishaangupta__ @markproduct Thx 🫡

@chuckmoroze @markproduct good advice chuck

What is the best platform to launch your product? - X - LinkedIn - Instagram

The #1 thing I learned from working with MrBeast? Obsession wins, raw obsession. And obsession over what: statistics and data. Jimmy was obsessed with statistics. He has entire data teams and even built his own platform with Chucky (Viewstats). Because of my time around these guys, I became obsessed with the data analysis behind content creation too. The problem is ever-evolving and incredibly intricate. I've made it my life purpose to understand retention and build the perfect model that can predict video retention before you post. Not a gimmicky model, not a flashy toy: a real analysis tool that can give alpha and reduce video performance variance when used properly in the long-run. It's why my co-founder and I started addictd. When you control the analytics, you control the narrative. We believe creators should create, and let us handle the math.

@solopribuilds Yeah I'm just getting into this world. It's awesome to see such a tight community of founders uplifting eachother!

@chuckmoroze Yeah we have huge network on X

If everyone is a founder, who's left to be the user?

Coding keeps customers too though don't forget about that. Also, I've met a ton of folks with genuine skill gaps where the product speaks for itself, word of mouth does the rest. If something is transformative: friends will put their friends on. Look at friendslop games, that's proof enough.

Hot take: Coding gets you a product. Marketing gets you customers. Agree or disagree?

YouTube just gave you free alpha. Their VP of Trust and Safety said: "AI personas talking about finance, legal or health will get demonetised." Every creator in these 3 niches is protected from an AI flood. Want less competition? Start a channel in one of these niches.

I think the most important element you highlighted is 3-5 years. Most people I know are so impatient. They see one app win in like 3 weeks and assume you need to instantly become a unicorn in a few months, even a couple years. I've always looked up to value investors like Munger, Buffett, Graham, and the principles they teach are long-term growth, but what that also means, as you mentioned, is building for the right people. The other element is building things of quality is what actually drives value and when you combine those and play the long game, it's pretty unlikely you'd completely fail.

If you just make a useful product and hammer valuable content (aimed at solving problems for that buyer avatar), you will win This sounds obvious, but here's where people mess up: 1. They make a product that looks cool but isn't actually useful (product value prop issue) 2. They make a product that is useful, but don't make any content (zero customers) 3. They make a product that is useful, but make content for the wrong avatar (audience match misalignment, typically from trying to go viral which gets views and not buyers) 4. They make a product that is useful, and make valuable content, but it's always forcing the product into the content (shill reputation, will eventually decay trust) Here's what to do instead... A. Make a useful product (that solves real pain). B. Make content at the category level, that solves viewer pain, where your product is the solve some of the time. This allows you to retain high trust, but also validate messaging at scale. If you haven't won or aren't winning, you're either making one of these 4 mistakes, or you haven't waited long enough. Rinse. Repeat. Run for 3-5 years. Profit. To be clear, this is the strategy to run where a personal brand (faced) account is trying to drive conversions to their product/service/offer. If you're a brand running the creator army playbook, that is a completely different strategy.

@buildwtim Discord is also a sleeper distro moat. People don't realize it, but fostering communities where people actively hangout anyways is awesome. I spent 1000s of hours talking to top folks in my industry on Discord.

If you're building a SaaS just because every founder is on X, you're probably wasting your time. Go where your customers already hang out. Builders rarely become your customers unless you're building something special for builders. Before I started building Kerix, I didn't even have X installed. My entire focus was Reddit, because that's where I found users for my first SaaS. Don't follow the crowd. Follow your buyers.

@natecurtiss_yt 0. Not enough raw eggs and tubs of Chobani lol

Good morning from paradise Rate the breakfast

Dropping out of UChicago was the scariest thing I've ever done in my life. I'm usually a risk averse dude. I built my Roth IRA to high five figures by 18, was grinding for it since I was 10 (I wasn't a normal kid). I worked really hard my freshman year, got a 3.8 GPA while working two jobs: one where I commuted an hour downtown and back before classes, the other from 5-9 at my school's alumni center. Sophomore year I went full grind mode again. Locked down interviews at Jane Street, Goldman, Blackstone, KKR, the list goes on: and after 4 rounds, Morgan Stanley finally gave me one final interview and I landed it a week later. I stressed that entire week, waiting for the MS job reply, because I tied all my value into landing an internship: not even a job, an internship. But then I gave it all away. And really quickly. It kind of felt like a haze. My mind was just so swamped with so much other stuff that the decision just came abruptly and in order to move fast it wasn't even an option to stay. But as someone who gets terrible buyers remorse, I got a similar feeling here. Deep down, I was flipping out. I got so in my own head, I couldn't even sleep most nights (granted I was working most nights too). Staying busy kept me in that haze, but I never truly conquered that fear, to be honest, I still haven't. I'm still scared, but someone told me something really valuable. It doesn't matter if I'm afraid, as long as I keep pushing and am doing it for a greater purpose, the timeline to success, the results, it all doesn't matter. If I just embrace the process for what it is, but stay dedicated, just like school, or the gym, or the other things I've done successfully, then it'll all pan out just fine. I know that this journey is just starting and I'm excited to see where it will take me, our company addictd, and the content industry as we continue to revolutionize the production process.

@samgrows Didn't know GOATs could type, but here we are

wish I could share more about what I’m doing on YouTube at the moment you’ll probably find a lot of my longform stuff anyways, it’s already been leaked on X but I think August will be my highest revenue month ever whilst doing YouTube

@Jayyanginspires Made my pledge, hyped to get the books for me and my team!

@chuckmoroze Haha what a bar 🔥

I wrote a new book: Work With The Best Out Sept 30th.

Everyone forgets this. I know folks with insane distribution, even worse churn, and then they can't exit or they've just ran through the entire market and lost all trust. They make good money, but that's not scaling, that's a hit and run model and doesn't really align with the true values of entrepreneurship imo

@omarvvvr Distribution gets people to the door. Quality makes them stay. One premium experience beats 100 average posts.

Founders who have traction... What's your biggest distribution lesson?

I watched a reel that equated personal brand building to the new rat race. I think this is actually quite true. Once the value prospect of endeavor becomes widely known ... it's like a gold rush all over again. However, I think it is only like that because people aren't building personal brands for the right reasons. I co-founded an AI startup and of course I want the world to know about what I'm building, how I'm building it, etcetera etcetera. But if I optimize for bottom of funnel, or even top of funnel, but all I'm chasing is conversions, the entire authenticity picture collapses. When I start rolling out my brand, I actually want things to be personally meaningful for me. It's the reason we even started our company addictd anyways. It was annoying to get a retention graph with a drop-off and have no clue why, so we wanted to build solutions to figure that out. This whole building journey has been about solving personal problems that we know others face too, personal brand needs to reflect that authenticity. So for the same reasons people hate corporate jobs, will be the same reasons people hate personal branding. They're in it for all the glory, none of the pain, and all the wrong reasons.

I've met so many "founders" claiming to build, and find that not too many folks actually are. Especially college kids. What are you guys seeing?

@PedroGuiti Grammarly for video

Sell me your startup in 3 words

Hot take: AI is actually good for content creation. Everyone is just building slop and using it wrong. Artificial Intelligence shouldn't be doing the generative components of the creative: it should be doing the math, the numbers, the non-creative elements. At the end of the day, most creators post because they want results. And whether results are their grand vision: meaning mass exposure, or if it's a necessary component to enable their true vision (an artist who can now do their art FT because they make enough off the views), the reality is views matter A LOT. And so why wouldn't you want to use tools that can reduce the variance in your content results and guarantee you better success. Don't stress out over the analytics dashboards, just let my company handle those boring, non-creative elements: optimize your content, predict the dead moments in videos before they happen, and ship better quality productions. We went to UChicago and built this platform because we geek out over the numbers, but you shouldn't have to: if you're a creator, you should create.