Codex Audentia

(This is not a blog. It’s a codex – raw, unpolished and brutally frank.)

A lot of changes happening. Business models are changing, therefore lots of opportunities. The data is pointing towards starting a distribution company that also does production, instead of a production company that also does distribution. Using this codex entry to save all the ideas in my head right now.

1. Free digital distribution has very low margin: Ads are NOT effective for monetizing online. Look at YouTube’s monetization:
   • https://onezero.medium.com/this-is-how-much-youtube-paid-me-for-my-1-000-000-viewed-video-1453cad73847
   • $1000 from 3 million viewers. So if you make a movie for a million dollars, ad revenue will not break you even.
   • $0.20 per view is the HIGHEST possible, for a really relevant video-ad match. It would still take 5 million people to watch the film for free in order to make $1m – doesn’t make sense!

2. Margins are only in DIRECT SALES – stuff that people BUY, by opening their wallets.
   • You have to create something that an end consumer will spend their own money on. The margins in those sales only will pay for the whole movie.
     
3. IDEAS:
   1. 3D/4D/VR
   2. Bandersnatch model: movies that change with viewer preferences
   3. Ecommerce store for merchandise, with partnerships to allow worldwide distribution. Will need geolocation to work.
      • Social shopping (Pinduoduo [1], [2] and Groupon) are worth pondering over.
   4. Throwing online or virtual events, meetups etc (both ticket sales and sponsorships: Airbnb Experiences model)
      • https://alexisgrant.com/2013/03/25/qa-how-nejla-routsong-is-building-a-business-around-a-meetup-group/
   5. Other add-on products and virtual goodies to sell along with the free film streaming.
      • You’ll probably make all your revenue from <1% of users (the ones who pay for stuff).
      • Extra footage and deleted scenes, buy personalized video messages from the cast, Q&A events, special mention in a future episode’s credits, and other unique experiences that you cannot purchase in general for movies.
      • Coupons (freecharge etc)
      • Lots to learn from the social gaming industry: look at Zynga and the World of Warcraft model – they sell in-game virtual items to people, and save the card details up front so that it’s easier to buy on impulse. No returns/refunds either. This requires a stable micropayments infrastructure. Look at Devrant app as well.
        
4. Localization and Internationalization of the platform, for every movie, will become CRUCIAL. Get worldwide distribution rights for all assets (and characters?) from creators and do a great job, just like Webtoons does.
   • Like how Pixar does it:
     • https://www.pixarpost.com/2015/01/laura-meyer-localization.html
   • Saving costs on dubbing, by hiring lesser known but talented people – you don’t need as much star power for dubbed shows.

(This is not a blog. This is a codex – raw, unpolished and brutally frank.)

In this codex entry, I’m exploring my thought process around how my company should spend its money at this particular stage – what I can delegate or outsource, what I can’t.

For a recap, I’m running a services company with one employee (myself). At this time, I don’t even have enough in profits to pay myself a salary.

Right now, I’m doing every single thing myself. Here are all the things that need to get done:

1. Accounting / bookkeeping
2. Sales and direct outreach (emails, phone)
3. Marketing: content creation (writing, audio, video, graphics)
4. Web development
5. Providing the service (teaching)

Out of these, let’s remove the ones I CANNOT outsource anytime soon, even if I had the money:

1. Accounting / bookkeeping
2. Sales and direct outreach (emails, phone)
3. Marketing: content creation (writing, audio, video)
4. Web development
5. Providing the service (teaching)

That leaves us with accounting, direct sales and web development.

Finance Philosophy

I look at the “three shoeboxes” picture. There’s money coming in, money going out, and then whatever’s left. Dead simple.

If the third box has no cash in it, something’s wrong – the company will die soon.

Now, cash represents two things: growth, and safety.

If invested in the right things at the right time, it can free up my time and lead to faster growth. At the same time, simply by sitting in the box, it is a buffer against unforeseen events.

To think about the whole thing, I’ve made some fundamental decisions about how SANPRAM will be run.

Decision Number 1: If we ever have to shut down, furlough or lay off people at SANPRAM, we’ll give them at least 2 months pay to act as a buffer. Therefore, the company must ALWAYS have that much “emergency money” stashed away. No exceptions.

Decision Number 2: A business needs a trusted ‘system’, to make money in a fairly predictable manner – we need to know what works. Until this system is figured out, we don’t have a business, and all actions of the company must be directed towards figuring it out.

Current Situation

In light of these 2 decisions, I ask myself the two corresponding questions:

Q1: Do you have enough money in the bank, to lay off a person after 3 months and be able to give them 2 months of buffer?

Q2: Do you have a line of sight on where your next few customers will come from?

At the moment, my answer to both questions is NO. I’m still figuring out my market, and don’t have enough data to be confident about my marketing plans.

Therefore, I cannot afford to hire anybody or outsource anything. I will need to continue to grind and do everything that I can by myself.

Planning Ahead

As soon as I make a few more sales and test my marketing funnel, I’ll be able to hire people to help set that funnel on fire and GROW at all costs. I’ll hire a VA, an accountant, and also outsource web development.

Until then, just gotta keep grinding? If I’m not confident about where my business will be in 3 months, how can I expect someone else to be?

The money I have in the bank right now should be set aside as the emergency fund – don’t want to touch it. But of course, I could be completely wrong about how I’m thinking.

A great online business needs a great website.

The goal: NOT to introduce the company, because based on my marketing strategy, most leads would likely know what we do before they know the company’s name.

Therefore the goal is to build ON TOP of that trust, and further cement the relationship the reader has with us, and leave a remarkable, lasting impression. It’s a good way of establishing the overall brand, and what we believe in.

Questions to ask myself

1. How do you build trust and rapport?
   1. Honesty
   2. Credibility/Expertise
   3. Consistency
   4. Humour, human connection
2. Who is the audience?
   1. Executives, business leaders, entrepreneurs. Or those who aspire to be in that position.
3. What is the end result?
   1. Visitor finds us likeable, and authentic. Unless they are sad people by default.
   2. Visitor is confident that we are the best at what we do.
   3. Visitor is interested in learning more about us.
4. What is the buying process?
   1. They consume our great content
   2. They decide they want to work with us
   3. They visit the course page directly and see if they want it.
   4. They may or may not check homepage. If they do, they find it refreshingly honest but credible.
5. How does it fit with overall marketing strategy?
   1. Great content available for free, ridiculously generous value
   2. Simple, refreshing, human but authoritative messaging and no hard selling
   3. Business AND technology experts
   4. Not overly “professional”

In the words of Alan Weiss, people are sick of you getting in their face trying to convince them how good you are. Nobody wants to know. They want to talk about how good THEY are.

Front Page Structure

1. Hero for first impression – sharp and bold typography, but the fluidity shows a human side. The visitor gets their first anchor about our brand.
2. Visitor is skeptical, so the first task is to build rapport. Charming, honest note that hopefully makes the visitor chuckle.
   • We don’t take ourselves seriously, but we are seriously the best
   • We don’t know you and you don’t know us, we understand that. And we don’t care because we have nothing to sell you. We want to be helpful first and foremost.
3. We have a less defensive visitor if they’re still reading. Now, we can make our first soft “close”: present to them the great work we’ve been doing. They can go to different content pages from here. Make each of them as attractive as possible, and give a GUIDE instead of an AD.

So for the meantime, SANPRAM will only have a few basic sections: Hero, Intro, Blog, CTA/link to course and Contact.

Intro Copy:

This was supposed to be a corporate-tongue, fancy-worded, and marketing-optimized introduction. *Cringe*

We couldn’t do that with a straight face, so here’s what it is.

Someday we’ll give you a sales pitch about how we are building the world’s greatest education company.

But for now, we’ll just let you start with our founder’s free essays. Our readership includes executives from 50+ countries and spans more industries than we’re aware of.

With every new post, we try to push the boundaries of what can be explained simply – such as self-driving cars and bleeding-edge AI technologies.

Go learn! If you enjoy the readings, consider applying for our flagship program: Advanced Technical Fluency, for non-technical executives and entrepreneurs.

Brainstorm Ramble Aug 4

Learning process:

1. Visualize desire/motivation
2. Learn high-level components
3. Learn lower level components

So, start with what the person is trying to do, and then go down the levels of abstraction one by one.

In the essay, we start at a very low level of abstraction (how a computer works, kitchen etc), and then build the story of how modern technology works. We also built some intuition around the high-level trade offs.

Next, since the goal of the program is to empower the imagination, as well as the ability to understand what people are talking about. And then some of it is jargon – which can be remembered through flashcards!

This course will be the best possible course they could ever take on technology. My superpower is not in the ability to explain things simply – it is to put things in perspective, and tell it like a story.

Technology simply makes things possible to do – it is a list of tools available. The use case and context diagram generates requirements, and technology is one of the constraints. So first, they need to exercise the process to generate requirements based on an idea, get a vague idea of constraints, and then explore which tools they have for meeting those requirements.

Start with systems design!!!
By the end of this module, they can unleash their imagination and start creating new tech ideas all the time. They now have the ability to think about automation and can “see under the hood” of large systems.

1. Business/Use cases
2. Rough sketch of whole system, start thinking with storyboards.
3. Context diagram for stakeholders and systems thinking
4. Exercise the intuition with 20 different examples
   1. 10 will be diverse business types that already exist (start with their own ideas, with the real solution available for reference)
      • Ecommerce, Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, Yelp, Medium/Twitter, Adobe, Square, Target, Kickstarter, Whatsapp, Tile, Passport issuing system, Mass surveillance system
   2. 10 are problems that he comes up with on his own
      (Categories of time, expenses, information and control)
      • Consider your own life and industry and work, and think about 5 problems you’d like to solve. Then, think about 5-10 different solutions for each problem. And then consider which solutions could be helped greatly by technology.

Then, we will do a review session and consider how to dive in and make possible each of these.

In today’s Ramble, I will write out my freerunning thoughts on what my new landing page for the technical fluency program should look like.

I believe my target learners are busy executives like myself, so I won’t have extremely long copy and fluffy marketing speak.

I want to communicate the WHY behind the course, then the HOW, and then the WHAT is least important. I also have to limit the number of learners I can take per month to 5, so I need to make sure the process for getting into the training program is not open to all. My time is valuable and I want learners who appreciate time. Moreover the learners need to be people that I’d enjoy getting to know, otherwise it’s not fun for me or for them. For now, I’d rather have fun happy clients whom I want to treat well than unhappy angry fucks who drain my energy.

One way to filter out people with a stick up their ass would be to start with a joke right off the bat. If they’re too “professional” they’ll probably bounce off right away.

So let’s get this going:

Goals:

• Visitors can clearly see that I’m the market leader in this space.
  • Fantastic looking design
  • Show expertise
• Visitors can put their trust in me
  • No bullshit
  • Clear and refreshingly honest messaging
• Visitors can visualize the future
  • “Visual” descriptions of end results
  • Emotional connection
• Visitors remember the site (it stands out)
  • Refreshing copy and structure
  • Slight humour
• Visitors are compelled to take action
  • Limited supply due to time constraints
  • Clear call to action

Organization

Keep asking the question “so what?” at every single step of the writing process. Highest priority in sales copy is empathy for the customer.

1. What the page is about (with a joke?)
2. Who I’m trying to reach (qualify)
3. Who I am, and why I’m doing this, the true cost of not learning this stuff
4. What the course’s goals are, with advice, and ROI. Empathy empathy empathy!
5. Course syllabus overview, with advice
6. Straightforward close – not humble, not pretentious (why me, why now)
7. Lay the price down without apology.

Still conflicted over the price. Constantly feeling like I’m giving away the product for less than it’s worth. It seems like $1199 is a good starting price per month, which can go up with time?

Target customers and their situation

This is my theorizing. There’s a certain element of me defining the people who I want to work with, and then some hunches based on experience.

Number one, they are busy, they are flipping smart, they are successful in their non-tech careers, and they are either very curious about these things or will greatly expand their opportunities and accelerate their careers if they could understand technology at a deep level.

They dread being in, or avoid being in meetings with technical executives and engineers because most engineers don’t have the heart of a teacher – so there’s a big disconnect. Which is a pity.

Their non-technical background is way more valuable in the tech field than he ability to write code. If they can take their vision and insights and speak tech when they have to, the combination is just killer – that’s the kind of skill the tech industry needs.

The world needs more technological solutions to problems, and that doesn’t mean we only need more coders.

So what does a success-driven, ambitious busy person care about? They don’t like being manipulated, they see the course as a necessary investment and not a luxury, and they like to associate with other elite. (This is actually a description of myself. I guess it’s true that you attract the kind of customer you are).