Ten years ago, four Buzzfeed staffers took the site’s pivot to video as an opportunity to film themselves trying things they’d never done before. With a video of them trying on women’s underwear that went viral, the Try Guys were born.
Since then, the guys—Zach Kornfeld, Keith Habersberger, Eugene Lee Yang, and Ned Fulmer—have risen to internet fame, branched off from Buzzfeed, toured a live show globally, and grown their content scope to include roughly two dozen series. The core group of Try Guys has also shrunk—Fulmer departed the group in 2022 after he was discovered to be having a relationship with an employee, and Yang left earlier this year to pursue his own projects.
As the two remaining original members, Kornfeld and Habersberger are marking a decade in business by moving the Try Guys in a new direction—forming an independent streaming service. Launched in May, 2nd Try was partially started to offset waning revenue from advertising and brand deals as YouTube gets increasingly crowded.
Kornfeld and Habersberger sat down with Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies podcast to discuss how they’re trying to bring an existing audience to a new platform, expanding the Try Guys orbit, and attracting new fans while hanging on to longtime viewers. This is a condensed and edited version of the conversation.
After making content for YouTube and even TV networks for the past decade, how are you viewing the content the Try Guys will put on 2nd Try?
Zach Kornfeld: It’s definitely a new era. We filmed Eugene’s farewell season and introduced the expanded cast, and we wanted it to have that feeling of a full chapter break. We’re going to be making a bunch of different shows, highlighting new voices, making things beyond what we could with just Keith and I in the starring role.
In every interview, we like to give a big shout-out to Dropout and Sam Reich. They were people we looked at as really forging the path for this type of model. And we saw within what they were doing an opportunity for us to do what we do best. We think we’re at our best when we’re making big shows.
At the same time, streaming is an uphill battle in a lot of ways. You’re charging $5 per month or $50 per year. That’s on the lower end of streamers, which should help with adoption. What are your main goals and benchmarks in this first year?
ZK: There are obviously benchmarks and numbers we’d love to hit, and at the end of the day, there is the commerce side of making art, right? You can’t just make stuff because it’s cool. You gotta pay for all the people who work here. But we’re also trying to really prove to our audience, “Hey, we are investing in this relationship over time just as we hope you invest in us.”
It’s an interesting time to try and get into streaming. Every major streamer seems to be struggling mightily. They’ve become too bloated. Their prices are too high, both for the consumer and also for what they are spending. So we’re trying to stay incredibly nimble. We are trying to create sustainably. I don’t ever expect, honestly, that 2nd Try is going to take over our business. But if it can be a stabilizing force, if it can remain 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% of our business, that will help weather the storm from all the shit that’s going to come.
The ad market is going to change. The algorithms are going to change. All of these things that are out of our control will happen, but if we can have a place where we are directly connecting with our audience and making stuff that they love, that they value, that reflects their values as people, we now stand a chance to be here five years from now.
You’re planning to still publish videos on YouTube and program for 2nd Try. Part of the value that Dropout had was its CollegeHumor back catalog that reduced churn rate to a huge extent. Are you worried that by doing both you’re upping your production costs and potentially bifurcating your audience?
Keith Habersberger: I’m sure we could do it a lot of different ways, and we talked about a lot of different ways to do it, but found that this was the best for our growth. We still need to keep giving them stuff and we still need YouTube right now as our big platform, because if we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t be able to afford [streaming]—we need it all.
ZK: I also want to clarify for your audience what our philosophy has been, which is that anything that we have been giving to our audience for free needs to continue that way. So there are shows that people have built up a relationship with over the last 10 years. We have Eat the Menu that comes out once a month. Without a Recipe is someone’s favorite show. To take that away from them would feel really disingenuous. I think it would feel like Lucy pulling the football out from Charlie Brown.
But what we can do is make new shows and we can have seasons of shows where we say, “Hey, here’s an episode to a new thing we’re making. Isn’t it cool? Come on over.” And hopefully, over time, we can then build up that catalog where the new shows are really what’s pulling people over as opposed to the old.
How has that been working so far?
ZK: We are only three months into 2nd Try. We have a lot to learn. It is not at a place yet where it is buttressing our company. It is something that we are investing into because we believe in it.
Our new stuff is outperforming and outpacing the classic stuff. Right now three of our top five watched episodes on 2nd Try are from one of our new shows, Escape the Kitchen, which is an escape room where people have to solve riddles and puzzles to get each step of a recipe. One of our other shows, Trolley Problems, which is brand-new, I think has five episodes in the top 10.
That’s a really promising sign, and for something like this to work, it is going to entirely depend on our ability to prove it. If we are just resting on our laurels of the past 10 years and saying, “Hey, you loved what we made? Now pay for it,” that is never going to work. We have to make new great stuff and we have to keep making new great stuff. We have to be innovative and prove to the audience again and again, year after year, “We are making things right now that you love, come on over, it’s worth supporting.”