Case Study 02: The Try Guys — What Makes a Media Company Durable

Origin

In 2014, four BuzzFeed employees — Ned Fulmer, Keith Habersberger, Zach Kornfeld, and Eugene Lee Yang — started filming videos in their spare time under the banner of "The Try Guys." The concept was simple: four regular guys trying things they had never done before. The videos were funny, warm, and human. They accumulated tens of millions of views on BuzzFeed's channels before the team made a decision that changed their trajectory.

In 2018, they left BuzzFeed. They signed no deal with a network. They launched their own company, 2nd Try LLC, with ownership split among all four founders.

This was genuinely risky. They had significant followings through BuzzFeed's platform but were walking away from BuzzFeed's brand infrastructure and institutional resources. They would have to build their own production operation, manage their own brand deals, produce their own content — and do all of it as independent operators in a creator economy that was still figuring out whether multi-person creator brands could sustain themselves without institutional backing.

They could. And what they built demonstrated specific things about what makes a creator media company durable.

What They Built

Over four years as 2nd Try LLC, The Try Guys built:

YouTube: Their main channel grew to over 7 million subscribers. They also built out secondary channels: Food Babies (a food content channel hosted by other cast members), About to Eat (another food-adjacent series), and individual creator channels for each founder.

Podcast: "Trypod," a podcast with over 100 episodes, adding an audio distribution layer.

Merchandise: A robust merchandise operation generating revenue independent of platform ad performance.

Books: Zach Kornfeld published a book. The group published content together. Traditional media distribution as an extension of the YouTube brand.

Live events: The Try Guys toured, performing live shows before audiences in multiple cities. Event revenue is platform-independent — you do not need algorithmic favor to sell tickets.

Staff: A production team of roughly two dozen people, including producers, editors, writers, and business staff. A real company.

The critical structural fact: The Try Guys had built a brand where the institutional identity — the name, the format, the four-person chemistry, the audience relationship — was genuinely separable from any individual founder's personal brand. This was not an accident. It was a specific, though perhaps intuitive, structural choice.

The Crisis

In October 2022, Ned Fulmer — often the most prominently family-focused member of the group, frequently called "the wife guy" by fans due to his public persona as a devoted husband — was separated from 2nd Try LLC following the revelation of a workplace relationship that violated company policy and contradicted his public persona.

The creators economy had never seen anything quite like this at this scale. A founding member of a major creator media company, removed under deeply damaging circumstances, in a business that generated real revenue and employed two dozen people.

Predictions were widespread that The Try Guys would not survive. The brand had been marketed as a four-person unit. Removing one person would either feel incomplete or force a rebrand so significant it would alienate the existing audience.

The predictions were wrong.

Why the Company Survived

Three months after Ned Fulmer's departure, The Try Guys — now three, plus a growing roster of recurring contributors — were still posting. Their subscriber count, after an initial drop, stabilized and began recovering. Their merchandise sales, by their own account, had not collapsed. The live tour went forward.

Why? Several factors that relate directly to the media company infrastructure they had built:

Institutional brand identity. "The Try Guys" was not primarily "Ned + Keith + Zach + Eugene." It was a brand identity built around a specific dynamic: people trying things together, being genuine about failure and growth, maintaining warmth and authenticity. This identity survived the departure of one founder because the identity was never purely personal.

Real company infrastructure. The Try Guys had HR, legal, and financial infrastructure. They were able to address the situation through established company processes rather than improvising. The employees knew what the company's standards were because those standards were documented. This may seem like a low bar — it is just having a real company — but the bar matters.

Audience trust in the institution. When they addressed the situation publicly, in an honest YouTube video, the audience response — while painful and complicated — was ultimately evidence that the audience had invested in the brand, not just individual personalities. The audience was angry and grieving. They were not simply leaving.

Multiple content lines. Having built Food Babies and other secondary channels meant the business was not entirely dependent on the main channel's performance during a difficult period. Revenue diversification is resilience.

Clear ownership structure. With a documented equity split among the remaining three founders and staff who understood their roles and compensation, the company did not face an internal ownership crisis on top of the external reputational crisis. The legal structure held.

The Eugene Lee Yang Factor

Eugene Lee Yang's arc within The Try Guys story is its own case study in individual brand-building within a media company context. While building the shared brand, Eugene was simultaneously building a powerful individual identity — as a queer Korean-American creator who addressed race, identity, and representation explicitly in some of the most-viewed videos on the channel.

His decision to leave The Try Guys (announced in 2023, completed in 2024) was a test of a different proposition: could the institutional brand survive the departure of not just one but two of its four founding members?

The answer appears to be yes — partially because of what they had built institutionally, and partially because Keith Habersberger and Zach Kornfeld continued with genuine energy rather than merely maintaining a declining brand.

The Business Lessons

Institutional identity must be real, not decorative. The Try Guys' brand survived multiple foundational shocks because the identity was genuinely embedded in the format, the chemistry, and the audience relationship — not just in the personal brands of any individual founder.

Crisis tests infrastructure. Companies that have HR, legal, and financial infrastructure handle crises differently than companies improvising. The Try Guys' ability to address the 2022 situation through legitimate institutional processes — rather than through informal, undocumented decision-making — was itself a sign of real company-building.

Revenue diversification buys time. In a crisis, having multiple revenue streams means you are not immediately at zero if one stream takes a hit. Events, merchandise, secondary channels, and direct audience revenue all contributed to the company's ability to survive a difficult period without collapsing.

The departure terms matter. How founding members exit a company has enormous downstream effects. The clarity of The Try Guys' structure — and presumably the clarity of their operating agreement — allowed the company to handle departures (both involuntary and voluntary) without an extended legal dispute that would have distracted from rebuilding.

Discussion Questions

1. The Try Guys survived because their institutional brand identity was stronger than any individual founder's personal brand within that brand. This is a deliberate design choice. How would you, as a creator, intentionally build an institutional brand identity that could survive your own departure? What would you have to sacrifice or give up to make that possible?

2. Eugene Lee Yang's individual brand became arguably stronger than The Try Guys collective brand over time, which contributed to his departure. How do you manage the tension between developing your own brand and investing in a shared institutional brand when you are a member of a creator team or collective?

3. The Try Guys' experience suggests that a real company — with genuine HR, legal, and equity documentation — handles crises better than informal creative collectives. At what stage of your creator business development do you think these institutional elements become necessary? Is there a risk of building too much institutional formality too early?

4. The economic and audience recovery after the 2022 crisis was not guaranteed. Many predicted the brand would not survive. What specifically do you think drove the audience's decision to continue supporting the brand? What does that tell you about what audiences are actually loyal to in creator businesses?