From YouTuber to CEO: The Management Evolution of Tim from FilmForce

Recently, Bilibili announced the list of the top 100 UP hosts in 2025. Filmora received the most danmaku (bullet comments) in 2025, with a total of 2.37 million danmaku. This shows the influence of this account in the hearts of its fans.

As of January 2026, according to public data from various platforms, Filmora's main account has 14.82 million followers on Bilibili, 11.51 million on Douyin, and 1.79 million on Weibo. The total number of followers of its main accounts across the entire network has exceeded 28.12 million.

It also has two other accounts, "StormCrew" and "A Little Bit Different". The total number of Bilibili followers of these two accounts exceeds 8 million, and they frequently produce popular content.

Obviously, Tim has turned Filmora into a high - quality content factory.

He Tongxue, another UP host with tens of millions of followers, said that he is most envious of Filmora because it can stably produce high - quality videos, which is by no means an easy task.

In addition to achieving great success in terms of traffic, Filmora has also reached a scale that its peers envy in terms of commercialization. The company's revenue exceeded 100 million in 2024. In 2025, it achieved a second growth curve in e - commerce and became a "cash cow". Just one type of T - shirt sold 200,000 pieces.

However, what we are going to talk about next is not a success story, but how this company almost died due to management issues. The complexity of managing a company far exceeds imagination and is by no means as simple as making a video.

Why are good content teams most likely to fail due to management issues?

In an interview with Luo Yonghao, Luo asked Tim if management was still a problem for him. Tim replied very casually that it didn't bother him at all.

The more relaxed Tim is now, the more stressed he was before.

He once said in his entrepreneurial confession, "I wanted to be a good person, a good boss. How could it turn out like this? The dreams we once shared have turned into nightmares. This kind of pain is hard to describe."

He was once deeply troubled by management problems and almost dragged the entire company down because of them.

Originally, Filmora was essentially a group of strong "individuals" coming together to make good videos.

At that time, the management logic was to turn to Tim for everything. When the number of the team increased, the company still adopted the operation mode of a small team: highly flat, with vague roles and no clear person - in - charge.

As a result, all the creative work and various management decisions were piled on one person, and Tim was on the verge of collapse.

Tim's early flat management model essentially meant avoiding the pain of "establishing rules". He just wanted to be a kind - hearted "good person" because rules seemed cold and heartless.

However, only precise and transparent rules can be the driving force for continuous content production.

When you avoid one kind of pain, the price is often another kind of pain.

For Tim, the two completely different natures of work, creation and management, brought him a lot of pain.

As a creator, Tim could give full play to his creativity at will, following his own rhythm and inspiration. But management is different. It requires making quick decisions, assigning tasks, and handling communication and coordination within the team.

When he had to deal with a bunch of trivial management affairs without direct feedback on results, he felt more and more overwhelmed and failed to do either job well. When problems piled up, the efficiency and morale of the entire team were also affected, and the company's flexibility gradually disappeared.

What's even more cruel is that although the number of employees in the company increased at that time, the actual quality and efficiency were terribly low.

He recruited new employees and also "sweating nervously" laid off some. Then, the company carried out its first systematic adjustment: business segmentation, content categorization, and standardization of the production process. However, this did not completely solve the problem.

When expanding the company, where does the real risk come from?

While the content team was under pressure, the company was also developing another line: e - commerce. At the beginning, Filmora's e - commerce business made frequent mistakes.

If the previous problem was "being busy", the e - commerce business brought a feeling of "panic". Product selection, placing orders, and investment rhythm largely relied on experience judgment, which was a whole set of operating logic.

Once the judgment was wrong, the problems would directly turn into inventory pressure, cash - flow risks, and actual losses.

It's hard to imagine that Filmora, a video - creation company, even sold peaches. Looking back later, Tim said, "I really don't know what I was thinking at that time. It's a decision that I could slap myself for. It was the worst category I could have chosen at that time."

They produced some products themselves, such as a Vision Pro headgear. They just thought it was fun at the time and placed an order for 5,000 units with the factory, but they couldn't sell them. At that time, hundreds of thousands of products were piled up in the warehouse, and the capital cost and inventory cost were increasing every day.

These decisions revealed that the founder's personal judgment had begun to become an organizational risk.

This is very common in many enterprises.

Often, the founder's cognition determines the success or failure of the enterprise. In many cases, the founder's judgment and intuition about the market may be one of the driving forces for the company's initial success. But once the company scales up, this way of relying solely on personal intuition becomes very dangerous.

For example, many Internet startups also made similar mistakes in their early days.

Some well - known brands were initially successful because of the founder's accurate grasp of consumer needs. But when they expanded their business and tried different product categories, they often blindly followed the trend without comprehensive market research and data support, which eventually led to inventory backlog and broken capital chains.

Finally, Tim also realized that e - commerce was no longer a business module that could rely solely on personal intuition. It was a field that required a high degree of systematization, data - driven decision - making, and professionalism.

When the founder's judgment becomes an organizational risk, the most important thing is not to "change the founder", but to build a perfect decision - making system and information - circulation mechanism.

E - commerce decisions changed from being "impulsive" to "information - oriented and risk - ahead", letting the system bear the uncertainties instead of individuals.

What is the core of a company's operation?

Do you think the story ends here? This company almost had a very serious management breakdown again.

The real critical point came in the spring of 2021 when the 618 commercial orders caused the company's production structure to collapse. This required the team to quadruple its production capacity without increasing the number of employees.

They successfully produced several episodes of content that the clients were not satisfied with, the audience didn't like, and they themselves didn't even want to watch. And the most ironic thing was that they didn't make any money, and the internal cost control was terribly poor. It was a complete failure.

Under pressure, Tim started laying off employees again. In his opinion, this was to cut losses.

But this was a typical misjudgment of regarding a systematic problem as an "individual mistake". After the project crisis and layoffs in March, the atmosphere in the company dropped to rock bottom, and even the supervisors chose to leave.

Tim's anxiety - related tic disorder also reached its peak. This was the loneliest and most helpless moment for an entrepreneur.

This time, he turned to his father, the president of YTO Express, and got three pieces of advice:

1. Blindly replacing people never solves the fundamental problem.

2. Effective quantification and reducing information asymmetry are the core of a company's operation.

3. Human nature cannot withstand challenges. Business is the art of dividing the pie.

These three sentences almost overturned all his previous intuitions.

The first one: Replacing the person who made a mistake and quickly taking a painkiller seems right. But if the same mistake keeps happening to different people, it's not a person's problem but a systematic one. Replacing people will only make the system train another person to make the same mistake.

The second one was the one that Tim took to heart first and had an immediate effect. Why is this sentence the "key"? Because before, Tim didn't know where the problem was exactly. He felt very busy and tired, with many projects running simultaneously. Everyone at every level was acting "reasonably", but together, it was a disaster.

So, they used Feishu to establish clear project management, and maximized information circulation among the teams.

The third one is the cruelest and most mature one. This sentence goes against a very common but very dangerous entrepreneurial belief: Everyone is a good person, and we can just tough it out. As long as we find the right people for the startup, everything will be fine.

In a company, when projects are overloaded, responsibilities are unclear, and rewards are uneven, even the best people will start to protect themselves, shift blame, and become emotional.

What does the "art" refer to? It means that everyone's output is equal to and matched with what they get. Fairness is the most important thing.

If the pie is not divided well: morale will decline, relationships will deteriorate, and decision - making will slow down.

What did these three pieces of advice really teach him? In fact, it's just one sentence: Don't rely on "better people" to solve problems, but on a "better structure".

Looking back, this company was forced to upgrade after multiple management mistakes.

When the team grows and the business becomes more complex, what really determines the upper limit is no longer individual ability, but whether the organization can continuously correct itself.

References:

Filmora's Bilibili video "The Entrepreneurial Story of a Top 100 UP Host" and "The Entrepreneurial Story of a Top 100 UP Host (2)"

Filmora's Bilibili video "What Have We Learned from 8 Years of E - commerce?"

This article is from the WeChat official account "Hundun University" (ID: hundun - university). The author is Hundun Academy, and it is published by 36Kr with authorization.