Jordan Orme on Editing for MrBeast, Justin Bieber, and Building a Career From One DM

Jordan Orme didn’t cold-pitch his way into editing for Justin Bieber, Post Malone, Tyga, and MrBeast. He sent one DM to a director he recognized from social media, got a one-word reply (“Cool”), waited a month, and drove an hour to LA when the call finally came. That’s the whole story — and it’s more instructive than any job board advice you’ll find.

Jordan graduated from film school in Southern California in 2019, went straight into freelance music video and commercial editing, and was working at a genuinely high level before the pandemic ended the party. With suddenly empty days and a friend’s suggestion rattling around in his head, he started a YouTube channel. That channel — built around breaking down music videos from a professional editor’s perspective — is now one of the biggest editing-focused brands on the platform. He also runs coaching, courses, and a podcast called The Editing Podcast where he interviews working editors across the industry.

This conversation covers the unglamorous path to premium clients, what actually drives retention beyond fast cuts, why your concept matters more than your technique, and where AI fits — and doesn’t — in the editing workflow right now.

The 3-Step Framework for Landing Serious Editing Clients

Jordan is direct about this: most aspiring editors focus on the wrong things. They want the big clients before they’ve built the foundation that makes landing them inevitable. He walks every one-on-one coaching client through three steps — and he’ll tell you upfront he stumbled through them out of order himself.

Step 1: Know your niche

Jordan fell into music videos by accident — he’s a drummer, music-driven edits felt natural, and a director happened to be hiring. But the principle holds whether you find it by design or by drift: pick a lane. Trying to be the editor for everything makes you the editor for nothing. Clients hiring at a high level want someone who lives in their world, not a generalist who can figure it out.

Step 2: Build your skill and your signal

Jordan splits this into two distinct problems that editors constantly conflate. Skill is how good you are. Signal is how discoverable you are. You can be the best editor alive and still go broke if nobody can find your work. His signal stack was simple: a Squarespace portfolio that let the work speak for itself, and consistent social media posting of what he was creating and passionate about. No gimmicks, no elaborate testimonials — just the work, visible and public.

“If you’re the best editor in the world and nobody knows who you are or how to find you or how to watch your work, you’re not gonna get booked.”

On the skill side, reps matter more than anything else. But there’s a caveat: reps only compound if you’re studying your own edits and other people’s edits every time. Making the same bad video fifty times doesn’t make you better. Iterating does.

Step 3: Friend-working, not networking

Jordan actively dislikes the word “networking” because it implies a transactional calculation that poisons the thing you’re actually trying to do. His reframe: friend-working. Make friends with key decision-makers. Be intentional about it. That can happen over social media, over a meal, or on a podcast — the medium matters less than the genuine connection.

This is what unlocked Jordan’s own break. He wasn’t applying to a job posting. He DMed a director he already knew from being active in filmmaking social media circles, mentioned something specific about what he admired in the director’s pacing and transitions, and just asked. One DM. One month of silence. One phone call. One drive to LA.

“All that took was literally a DM. That’s literally it. So people just need to ask, pretty much.”

Worth noting: when he got to the meeting, the director asked if he knew After Effects. Jordan said no. He still got hired. The relationship mattered more than the technical gap.

What Actually Keeps People Watching (It’s Not Fast Cuts)

Jordan came up through music video and commercial editing, where the instinct is to make things move fast. But he’s nuanced on retention in a way that a lot of YouTube advice isn’t — and he’s been on both sides of it, editing his own channel solo and now working with a team of editors where retention data is one of the primary feedback signals they use.

His early retention instinct wasn’t data-driven. It was filmmaker instinct: if something was confusing or boring, it got cut. “Kill your babies” — or as his friend Hayden puts it, “murder your darlings.” That gut-level standard got him further than most beginners because it’s actually the right question: is anything here boring or confusing? If yes, cut it.

But he pushes back on the idea that optimizing for retention metrics is the same thing as making a good video. Sometimes the cut that scores best on the retention graph isn’t the cut that serves the story. And sometimes a slightly lower retention video performs better in the algorithm than a tighter one, because the underlying idea was stronger.

The open loop structure that makes reaction content work

Jordan’s format — a professional editor breaking down music videos — has a retention mechanic built in that he didn’t consciously design but can now clearly articulate. When you click on a video of him dissecting a Taylor Swift or K-pop music video, there’s an open loop: you want to hear what a pro editor thinks about this thing you already care about. That loop stays open for exactly as long as the music video does. Once the music video ends, the loop closes. And Jordan can see it in his analytics — people drop off the moment the music video finishes, because the reason they came has been resolved.

The broader storytelling principle he applies to all video: a character pursuing a goal with obstacles in the way. Establish someone the audience cares about. Make the goal clear. Raise the stakes (what happens if they get it? what happens if they don’t?). Then follow them through. That’s not a YouTube tactic — it’s how stories have worked for as long as humans have sat around fires. YouTube is just the campfire now.

On the intro specifically, Jordan’s framework is two shots. Shot one is your title and thumbnail — that’s your first impression, the setup of the story, the open loop. Shot two is the first thirty seconds of the video itself, where your job is to confirm the click. Yes, this is the video you thought it was. Here’s why the topic matters. Here’s who’s speaking and why they’re worth listening to. Here are the stakes. Answer every naysayer question that might make someone bounce before they give you a real shot.

Why your concept matters more than your execution

Jordan is blunt about something a lot of editors don’t want to hear: if the core idea isn’t interesting, nothing else you do will save it. Perfect pacing, tight sound design, great color — none of it matters if the concept at the center is something people don’t care about. He sees this constantly with editors who execute technically at a high level and still can’t figure out why the video flopped. Usually it’s the idea, not the edit.

His approach to developing taste — the thing that separates good creative decisions from average ones — is deliberate exposure. He’s a regular user of Director’s Library, a curated site of films he uses for inspiration. The point isn’t to copy techniques. It’s to absorb what works, understand why it works in context, and then ask whether a version of it could work in your next edit. That’s how taste develops: not by learning rules, but by watching a lot of great work and internalizing the logic behind the choices.

How Jordan Actually Works: Process, AI, and the Editing Workflow

Jordan’s editing process has stayed largely consistent since film school, regardless of format. He calls it the Editing Formula — a specific order of operations he can apply across different types of projects.

It starts with the story layer: voiceover, A-roll, interviews — whatever is carrying the narrative in words. He builds the structural spine of the video from that first. From there, music. He’s emphatic that music selection is one of the most underrated skill gaps between good editors and great ones. Getting the right track, cut to the right emotional beat, is not a minor detail — it’s foundational. Everything else (B-roll, sound effects, color, graphics) layers on after those two foundations are in place.

For the 30-stadiums-in-30-days daily vlog series he recently finished — a project where a friend visited every NBA stadium, raised $100,000 for Make-A-Wish, and set a world record — the workflow scaled up. An assistant editor handled assembly cuts; Jordan came in as the finishing editor, adjusting pacing, adding music, sound design, and graphics. One polished video every other day.

Where AI actually is (and isn’t) in editing right now

Jordan is skeptical of the hype without dismissing the tools entirely. His honest read: most things being marketed as AI are just more advanced programming — automatic rotoscoping, audio enhancement, noise reduction. Useful. Not revolutionary. The AI label gets slapped on things because it sounds impressive.

The tools he finds genuinely interesting, like Eddie AI’s rough-cut generation from text-based editing, raise a real tradeoff: yes, you skip the tedious assembly stage, but you also skip the part where you load all the footage into your brain. Jordan values that download process because it’s how he builds his internal reference map for a project — knowing exactly where that one line was, being able to retrieve it intuitively mid-edit.

Where he does see real opportunity: editors who can combine traditional craft with AI visual generation are essentially operating as a one-person production. You’re not just an editor. You’re a producer-director who can generate assets, prompt environments, and deliver what used to require a full crew. That’s a marketable and increasingly rare skill, and Jordan is actively trying to hire for it.

His overall take: editing itself hasn’t fundamentally changed. The process that works is still the same process. But ignoring AI tools entirely is also a mistake — the ceiling for what a skilled solo editor can produce is rising, and the editors who understand both sides will be the ones who can charge for it.

Building a YouTube Channel When You Can’t Monetize the Videos

One thing that rarely gets mentioned when people discuss Jordan’s channel growth: for a long time, he couldn’t make AdSense money on any of it. Music videos contain copyrighted music. The content that was driving 150,000 views a pop was essentially demonetized at the source.

His path to monetization wasn’t through YouTube’s ad revenue — it was through brand deals. Envato Elements was his first sponsor, and that’s when he recognized the channel as a real business, not just a fun project that happened to go viral. The lesson: a channel can build significant leverage even when the primary content format isn’t directly monetizable, as long as you’re building a real audience with a clear identity.

He’s also candid about the structural limitation of reaction and breakdown content: it’s easier to grow fast because you’re borrowing the existing interest in Taylor Swift or K-pop. But people often come for the subject, not for you. Building a personal brand around that is harder than it looks because the audience’s primary loyalty is to the topic, not the creator. He describes this as a real trade-off — not a reason to avoid the format, but something to understand clearly before you build an entire strategy around it.

His reaction channel eventually became primarily K-pop content because that’s where the audience landed. So he now runs four separate channels: the K-pop reaction channel, a second reaction channel for commercials and American music videos, a new personal brand channel (Jordan Edit) focused on helping people build creative careers, and a fourth channel for pure experimentation. Each one serves a different purpose and a different audience.

What Separates Premium-Rate Editors From Everyone Else

Jordan breaks down the premium rate question into three factors, and the first one is the one the industry almost never talks about directly: taste.

Once you’ve learned the tools — how to make a cut, how to do transitions, how to mix sound — the only thing that genuinely separates you from another technically competent editor is the creative decisions you make. What you choose to keep. What you choose to cut. The music you select. The pacing you feel. That’s taste. And taste is what clients and audiences are actually paying for when they pay a premium. You can teach someone Premiere Pro. You cannot easily teach someone to have consistently great instincts.

The second factor is the type of work you’re doing. Commercial and business editing commands higher rates because there’s a direct ROI attached — more views on a well-made commercial means more product sales, which means the asset has measurable value. Music video editing, by contrast, is largely art — fun, prestigious in certain circles, but rarely connected to revenue in a way that justifies premium pricing unless you’re operating at the absolute top of the field.

The third factor is one that has nothing to do with editing at all: who you are to work with. The film industry involves twelve-hour days, all-nighters, and long stretches of close collaboration. People hire people they want to be around. A relentlessly positive, generous, hard-working editor with a great attitude is genuinely rare — and that rarity is a competitive advantage. Jordan learned this as an introvert who had to consciously develop the skill of being enjoyable to work with. It paid off.

The Only Advice That Actually Matters for New Editors

When asked for one piece of advice for someone who wants to start editing and posting today, Jordan didn’t reach for a tactical tip. He went straight to the real problem:

Most people don’t finish the thing. They start something, maybe they make something, but they don’t post it. And the act of finishing, shipping, getting feedback, and doing it again is the entire game. Jordan is direct that being an editor is being an artist — and artists who keep their work in a drawer don’t build careers. The closet artist stays unknown.

His instruction: finish it, post it, do it again, and study what happens. Your first videos will be bad. Post Malone’s first songs were bad. Jordan’s first videos were bad. That’s the rite of passage, and no amount of preparation skips it — you only get through it by going through it.

The same logic applies to building client relationships. Most people know they should reach out to the directors and creators they admire. Most people don’t do it. Jordan sent a DM with a specific, genuine compliment about a director’s work. A month later, that director called him. That’s the whole formula.