The Octopus Analogy for Building a Team
Cut off each arm you're worst at and replace it with someone better
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 86%
Brownlee frames the solo creator as an octopus: one main focus (reviewing tech) plus seven other arms flailing at camera work, editing, lighting, sound, thumbnails, inbox, finance and taxes. Building a team means cutting off each arm and replacing it with someone far better at that specific function. The purpose is explicitly quality, not throughput: every hire makes the thumbnails, sound and design better than the founder could manage. The creator stays as the octopus's beating heart, still owning the craft and content strategy, while the specialists own their arms. The analogy also warns that scaling adds a brand-new arm, managing people, which is a separate learned skill and a real time cost the founder must plan for.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal. Brownlee's own recurring metaphor for how the MKBHD studio grew from him alone to a team of roughly eleven specialists, each better than he is at their arm.
Core principles
- 01A solo creator is an octopus doing eight jobs to keep one main focus alive
- 02Every arm you keep is a job you do worse than a specialist would
- 03You hire to raise quality, not to raise output
- 04Keep the one or two arms that are your actual craft and identity
- 05Managing people is itself a new arm you must grow
How to run it
- 1
Map all eight arms
Write out every distinct function you perform: your main craft plus all the supporting jobs like shooting, editing, sound, graphics, inbox and finance.
- 2
Protect the heart
Identify the one or two arms that are your actual identity and craft; you keep these as the beating heart of the operation.
Pro tip For Brownlee this is talking tech, reviewing tech and content strategy; everything else is a candidate arm to remove.
- 3
Cut the weakest arm first
Hire against the function where a specialist most outperforms you, often triggered by an acute pain point rather than a plan.
Pro tip His first hire came after a CES where he sat in a hotel with half the footage he wanted and realized he needed a second set of hands.
Watch out Hire out of genuine necessity; a role added for status rather than need becomes dead weight.
- 4
Judge each hire by quality, not volume
Confirm the new arm makes the output better than you could, rather than just letting you produce more of the same.
Watch out If the goal drifts to 'more stuff,' you are building a content factory, not cutting arms.
- 5
Grow the management arm
Accept that becoming the hub of the wheel adds a new job, controlling the control, and set aside real time to learn it.
Watch out Founders are surprised by how much time managing people consumes; unbudgeted, it starves the craft it was meant to protect.
In the wild
Brownlee started doing everything himself. His first hire, Andrew, came after a brutal CES left him with half his footage and no second set of hands. Over time he added cinematographers, an editor, a sales manager, podcast and motion-graphics specialists. Each one, he says, is much better than he is at their arm, so thumbnails, sound and set design all improved. He stayed as the beating heart, still owning tech and content strategy.
→ A roughly eleven-person studio where every function is handled by someone better than the founder, raising overall quality.
Common mistakes
Hiring to make more, not better
Adding arms to increase output turns the team into an assembly line and puts you on a treadmill whose speed only goes up.
Ignoring the management arm
Founders forget that becoming the hub adds a whole new job, and without budgeted time it degrades the very craft the team was built to protect.
Is it for you?
Best for
Solo operators ready to build a small, high-skill team around a single creative core.
Not ideal for
Anyone hiring to crank out more volume rather than to raise the quality of each piece.
From the transcript
“the team we've built is all of the arms that I've cut off”
“you become you have to add an arm, which is managing people”
From the episode
MKBHD: The Story To 16 Million & The World Of YouTube
MKBHD