An Interview with Oliver Gilpin, Alvaro Calmet, and Mary James
Most creators launch a new show and hope the algorithm notices.
The founders of Run Monster Run took a different approach. They treated the launch as a system: combining YouTube collaborations, strategic cross-promotion, trend-driven Shorts, strong character development, and lessons learned from building successful digital IP.
The result: roughly 30 million views across the Run Monster Run pilot and Shorts campaign in about six weeks, with virtually no traditional advertising.
Now the team is looking to turn that audience into something much bigger: a premium serialized 3D animated series and entertainment brand with merchandise, games, licensing opportunities, and a direct relationship with its audience.
It has been about nine months since we last spoke. What has changed with you, the company, and your different IP?
The last time we spoke, we were in the final production phase of the pilot for our newest IP, Run Monster Run, which Alvaro Calmet created and brought Mary James and me (Oliver) onboard. We completed production in June and launched the pilot alongside roughly 20 YouTube Shorts. Collectively, the campaign generated around 30 million views in about six weeks, so the launch was a tremendous success.
At the same time, Alvaro and I have continued growing SolarBalls, including its merchandise business and global distribution. We’re now on Amazon Prime, and we’re continuing to expand the show’s distribution around the world.
We also sold out of the first run of our SolarCards game and are preparing to launch the second edition, with hundreds of new cards, and in the fourth quarter’s we’re planning a much larger push around SolarBalls.
It’s important to point out that Run Monster Run is a completely separate IP with a different production team.
Tell us more about Run Monster Run. What is the show and who is it for?
Run Monster Run follows three monster-friends: Zappy, Gloom and Nebulor. They live an ordinary life in a strange facility where they’re taken care of… until one day, they discover the truth about their captivity and are forced to pull off the biggest escape in history!
It’s high-quality 3D animation which Alvaro created to turn into a bigger franchise. We’re thinking about it as four-quadrant storytelling: something everyone can enjoy.
With Run Monster Run, we took a very different approach. It’s a digital-first strategy, but the three of us formed a more traditional media partnership with the goal of building something that could scale to a broad audience.
At the center of the story are our three heroes. They come from completely different worlds and have very distinct personalities. But ultimately, those differences become their greatest superpower. Together, they bring humor, heart, and plenty of action to an adventure that is entertaining on the surface but has a deeper meaning underneath.
As the series unfolds, the mythology and lore become much richer, revealing a story that increasingly connects with some of the challenges facing our world today.
At its heart, Run Monster Run is a celebration of diversity, unity, and the extraordinary power of friendship.
After building SolarBalls and other successful channels, do you feel like you have developed a science for launching a new brand?
Definitely. We spent a huge amount of time planning the launch of Run Monster Run, and we used almost every strategy in the playbook.
For the month before launch, we posted three Shorts every week. The goal was to start introducing the characters and warming up the audience before the pilot arrived.
We also used YouTube’s collaboration feature, which allows a smaller channel to be introduced to the audience of a larger channel.
We used that across established channels we had relationships with, including SolarBalls and MrSpherical. We also collaborated with our friend Jenny Hoyos, who is a huge creator generating around half a billion views a month.
Another strategy was using end-screen promotion from the most popular videos across our other channels, specifically targeting audiences we believed would be relevant.
Across the YouTube channels we own, we linked roughly 150 existing videos to the new Run Monster Run content for about a week using end-screen cards. That alone generated more than 100,000 views.
One of the most important lessons we’ve learned about YouTube is that success isn’t always about getting high numbers of views. A smaller number of highly relevant viewers can be much more valuable because they can act as a catalyst, helping YouTube understand who should see the content next.
How does the YouTube collaboration feature actually work?
You collaborate with a larger channel, whether that’s a friend, another company, or one of your own established channels.
The video is still posted on only one channel, but YouTube can essentially look at the other channel’s audience and determine whether the new content is relevant to those viewers.
That gives the algorithm more information and can help a new channel find its audience much faster. It’s extremely useful when you’re launching something new.
What does the larger channel gain from that collaboration?
In most cases, the larger channel doesn’t gain very much directly.
There can be some positive brand association if the new project feels fresh and exciting, but generally it’s a fairly one-sided equation.
That means the larger creator usually has to be a close friend who genuinely wants to support you, a business partner, or someone you compensate through a commercial arrangement.
Launches are incredibly important, though, so I do think paying for the right collaboration can make sense.
When you launched SolarBalls, you used common science questions as entry points. Did you reverse-engineer Run Monster Run in the same way?
No. Run Monster Run was approached very differently.
The actual pilot and the upcoming ten-episode season were built primarily around Alvaro Calmet’s creative vision as the writer, director, and visionary behind the show.
The story itself wasn’t reverse-engineered around YouTube search topics, which is very typical of YouTube-optimized content.
Our YouTube-first changes were more about pacing, packaging, and the fandom strategy.
For example, the episodes don’t begin with long introductions or slow previews because YouTube audiences can be fickle.
One thing I would really emphasize is the importance of the thumbnail. Most people think the thumbnail is a relatively minor part of a video’s success. In our experience, it can be just as important as the video itself.
That’s scary to acknowledge, but it’s reality.
It’s also surprisingly easy to create a bad thumbnail while believing it’s a good one. There are so many small details involved that we studied the process very carefully.
And sometimes those details are exactly what ruin a thumbnail. If you lose the clarity of the concept or make it harder for someone to process at a glance because you’re trying too hard to make the image beautiful, it can actually backfire.
That’s a particularly common mistake with artists and animators because artists naturally love detail.
Beyond those adjustments, Run Monster Run is still an animation series designed to compete with premium content on the biggest streaming platforms in the world. We simply chose to launch it on YouTube first.
Our Shorts strategy was also very intentional.
We used Shorts to introduce the characters, reveal their personalities, and create an emotional connection between the audience and the world. But the reality is that most people aren’t automatically going to care about unfamiliar characters in a completely new universe.
That’s where trendjacking became useful.
We combined our characters with music trends, TikTok trends, memes, and familiar formats. The trend gives viewers an immediate reason to engage. At the same time, they gradually become familiar with the characters, the humor, and the larger universe.
Looking back, what would you change about the launch?
The Shorts strategy was absolutely the right decision.
It could have failed, though. For the first 15 days, I thought it was failing. We were getting only about 15,000 views per Short. Then the pilot launched, and suddenly we were getting millions of views per Short. It worked extremely well.
More than ‘change something’ I would rely less on trend jacky shorts and perhaps explore more of the mysterious side of the show.
We saw in our data that the shorts where the characters had dialogue, or where some of the more intriguing aspects of the show were hinted at, started to perform quite well, even compared to the ones using trendy songs and such.
Audiences reward confidence, and algorithms work around what audiences want (most of the time.)
Was this growth mostly organic, or did you spend money promoting it?
It was almost entirely organic.
The only money we spent was a small amount on external promotion to have a few creators add the pilot to their end screens.
Our core marketing budget was invested in producing the Shorts because, in digital-first IP, the content itself is the marketing.
The rest (the fan videos, reactions, views, and engagement) should happened organically.
Could this strategy work for someone with very little or no money?
Producing a show of this caliber obviously isn’t possible without some level of investment. But assuming you can get the show made, the marketing can be done relatively inexpensively.
With digital-first IP, the content is often the marketing. Those two things need to be designed together from the beginning.
My strongest advice for someone trying to build excellent marketing potential with relatively little risk would be to find a creator who is already successful on the platform where you want to launch.
Find someone who genuinely likes what you’re making and gets excited about the project.
They may be able to promote it through the collaboration feature, but even more importantly, they can help you develop the content specifically for that platform.
They might tell you that the pacing needs to improve in a particular section. They may know which trends make sense for Shorts. They might even bring other YouTubers in to voice characters, which gives those creators a personal connection to the show and makes them more likely to promote it.
A creator partner who truly understands the platform can help shape the content in ways that naturally improve its marketing potential.
One of the things you’ve done particularly well with SolarBalls is create revenue beyond YouTube advertising. What is the monetization strategy for Run Monster Run?
With SolarBalls, Patreon has been a major part of the business. In fact, we operate the largest animation Patreon in the world.
For Run Monster Run, we’re planning to approach licensing and distribution in a more mainstream way. We’ve used digital platforms to prove there’s an audience, and now we want to leverage that momentum to build a broader licensing, consumer products, and distribution strategy across both traditional and digital channels.
Of course, we’ll also focus on online merchandise. We launched the pilot with an online store featuring plushies, a board game, beanies, and T-shirts.
As episodes two and three are released, viewers will become more connected to the characters and the world, and we expect merchandise revenue to become meaningful, which will allow us to reinvest into production.
We designed the characters intentionally: they’re visually distinctive, highly identifiable, and toyetic.
Ultimately, we believe Run Monster Run has the potential to become one of the great 3D animation IPs of the late 2020s. We truly believe Zappy, Gloom, and Nebulor can become household names.
We have an incredibly passionate and talented team, and we couldn’t be happier with the response we’re getting from what’s ultimately most important: the audience.