Here, I went on Facebook video and shared my thoughts on how to be more badass in the robot apocalypse, how to make money off tiktok, how to format the pay structure of online courses, how long do you thrash, and planning for retirement.

So many people in entertainment are trying to change their business to make things work now. I wrote about the two ways to do this, but neither of them are actually about changing. They’re about starting new businesses. The problem many of us have is that we didn’t start our first business well. We were young and broke and it didn’t matter.

Now, we have responsibilities like mortgages and bookies that demand payment. We can’t jump in with no business plan and see what happens.

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At this time more than ever, people are facing a great weakness. Their own willpower.

There’s a common fiction that tells us prolific people are busy getting stuff done because they have amazing willpower. Even prolific people say “I must have willpower because I did all this stuff others couldn’t do. I guess I’ll tell people that willpower is the way!”

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It’s impossible to separate the creator from the creation.

The reason I don’t like cover songs is the same reason I don’t watch Woody Allen movies.

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covid makes you cough

Many contagious diseases cause your body to do an involuntary thing like puke or cough or sneeze and this makes transmission of the disease super awesome! The user downloads the virus, then shares.

The common belief about viral content (videos, articles, memes, etc.) is that they are so good, they trigger an involuntary response to share. This isn’t how it works. People aren’t just coughing buzzfeed articles all over their friends faces because of great quality.

Sharing is not involuntary. It’s expensive.

When you share something with friends, coworkers, family, you are making a statement. You’re vouching for the content. You’re attaching it to your name and your reputation. I know, it sounds heavy, but this is what you’re doing each time you share. It’s not the same as liking something in private.

Sharing is a thoughtful response. It’s not involuntary.

Entertainment creators are tool builders not virologists

When I consume a viral video, it is really a social tool. It’s not about how I enjoy the video as much as how much I think the video will help me socially. When I share this, what will it do for me? Maybe it demonstrates…

• my intellegence
• I know about the underground
• my great sense of humor
• my creepy sense of humor
• my deep knowledge of a subject
• where I see myself in society
• that I’m a curator
• a justification of my life choices

To keep this in my mind when creating stuff I imagine the headline “Study finds people with tattoos have higher IQs”

Is everyone gonna share this? No! People dedicated to tattoos who feel marginalized because if it will. People with kids that are heavily tattooed will. People who think they have something funny to say on the topic “If I would have gotten these tats earlier, maybe I would have gotten my GED!”

Nets Level

To go beyond viral is to use the network effect. The network effect means when something is shared, it’s core value increases. If you have a telephone, but nobody you want to talk to has one, your telephone is useless. A phone is for talking to people. The more people there are to talk to, the more valuable the phone gets, this motivates every phone owner to ask more people to get phones. That’s how facebook got big.

The thing that is crucial with this is that it has to be the core value. So, having your friends buy the same car as you, might be fun, but that’s not the network effect. The network effect would be getting more people in your motorcycle gang to buy motorcycles.

You can build the opposite of viral too

If people like what you do want to hoard it, that can hurt your shareability. Let’s say you have a limited capacity venue, your ticket buyers might not want it to get too popular. Or, you could have a live stream where viewers make requests. Their requests are less likely to be picked if the audience is huge.

/// BREAKING NEWS /// Small audiences suck!

I’m learning more and more about how wrong I was about audience size. Selling tickets, getting TV viewers, snagging big podcast downloads… These are not best built organically. These are not the reason to do what we do. These are the METHODS to do what we do.

A Christmas Story

Last year, I was working for a living doing a bunch of other gigs and stuff. Scot Nery’s Boobietrap when available is on Wednesday nights. It takes up a reasonable amount of my time, but it’s not the way I pay my bills; so when people were telling me to add on weekend shows for the holidays, I flinched. That’s a lot of extra work that wouldn’t really benefit me or anyone involved much.

I had a long chat with Colin Campbell who suggested “What if you do weekend shows to promote the Wednesday shows?”

I had never thought of it this way before. Weekend shows sell out faster, people think differently about going out on a weekend than a week day. We would have a different group of people we could convince of the experience of Boobietrap.

Suddenly it was worthwhile to do a weekend show. Not just more people and more fun, but building on the popularity of the weekly juggernaut.

We rearranged how the system worked and got to pay everyone a little more. The promotions were easy for these special shows. They were also family friendly, so it was cake. The weekend shows were popular and the Wednesday shows grew.

We need big audiences

This is becoming more and more clear to me as I see people working hard for a 15 audience member live stream. You can see it right there on the corner of the video player. 15 people are watching this for free. Or, a video with all kinds of planning and post production getting 110 downloads.

Maybe we’re practicing. Trying out a concept to build the show we’re going to do. Awesome. That can be done and erased from the web, but if we’re presenting a real product, let’s get real and go big.

The downsides of a small audience

I just want to quickly remind the reader all the small parts that go into small audiences sucking.

• less attention for what we do
• less impact on the world
• less legacy
• less direct income ( ticket buyers / subscribers / product purchasers)
• less residual income ( audience building profits, merch sales, secondary sales )
• less 3rd party income ( sponsors, investors, grants, peer donations )
• worse audience experience ( it can be embarrassing to do something only 8 other people are doing )
• worse creator experience ( it sucks to make something for few people )
• because of income, it may not be sustainable. The creator might not be able to stick with it when bills come due and other work -work with paychecks – comes in
• fewer other creatives want to get aboard a sinking ship

Grassroots are dirty

My old thinking — maybe the common thinking — is. “make something great, tell people about it, and it will catch on.” My new thinking is, “make something great, part of it being great is that people want it, part of it being great is that it ensnares audiences, part of it being great is it’s made to grow itself… and then bring in a big audience to start the machine working.”

Small entertainment is hard to grow. Not only do you have little word of mouth, but you create something small, get it working, then it wouldn’t really work big. For example, you start a live stream where your thing is you respond to every comment. You get 1000 viewers and you can’t keep up anymore.

Buy your audience

The simple formula for great advertising is…

[cost of acquisition] + [cost of serving a customer] < [lifetime value of customer]

Basically: The money you spend on advertising is less than you get back. This is important to remember for scaling your business, but at the beginning, you have to spend more on advertising to get a big audience to start because the audience is part of the advertising.

If you don’t have money, you have to use other resources. Possibly legwork. Possibly calling individual people and telling them to download your ebook so that you reach a best-seller status on Amazon.

Before buying your audience, set a Boobietrap

In my fixing church post I talk about keeping audiences. You wanna set up stuff for your entertainment product that 1) keep them around and 2) get money from them. If you have unlimited funds, replace “get money from them” with “make the impact you want” because no matter what I’m sure you’re doing things so that you make a difference.

It would be a total waste to buy an audience just to let them vanish.

If you want repeat customers, you have to be aggressive. To keep them around…

• FOMO what’s built in to what you do that compels someone to come back for more? A few laughs is not enough
• Lock in why does it hurt to walk away from your product?
• Sunk costs what makes it feel like a prudent choice to stick around?
• Fandom what connects with your audience’s highest needs?
• Network effect how does telling every friend make your audience’s experience better
• Remarket what’s a way you can capture your audience’s contact information? it’s a lot easier to talk to someone who already likes you than constantly reaching out to new folks.

To get money from them…

• sell them the product ( I mean the very one they’re experiencing by selling tickets or whatever)
• upsell them a product enhancement ( like buy a beer while you’re here and the show will be funnier )
• use your high audience volume as a way to lure advertisers or other money people.
• sell them something for their fandom ( t shirts or something)
• sell them a different product that taps in to the thing they like about the current product.

If I read this five years ago

I don’t know what I would have thought. It all might have sounded kind of conniving to do all this thoughtful stuff.

Now, I’m thinking if you start without even considering how this stuff will grow, you’re missing out. Starting with a big audience serves everyone involved. The techniques for “trapping” audiences are also the techniques that make experiences fulfilling for them.

Sound is moving air. I microphone picks up the movement either through wiggliness or compression and turns it into electricity.

Microphone aiming

1. Unidirectional mics can hear in one direction like a telescope. You point them at the hole in your mouth and they will not pickup a ton of other noise.
2. Omnidirectional mics listen in all directions. You put them close to your mouth and they will pick up everything that’s going on around them, but if your mouth is close, they will pickup your voice louder than everything else.
3. Shotgun mics have two microphones. They listen like a telescope, but then they also have another microphone that listens to the ambient noise and tries to cancel it out. They are good if you want to get space between your mouth and the mic. Like if you are shooting video and you want the microphone to be off camera.

Microphone Styles

1. Headset is worn either on your ear or attached to your head. It is away from your face and close to your mouth. Usually these are unidirectional and right there where they need to be. Used for stage presentations, telemarketers. It’s good for cutting out background noise and wind, with mobility, hands-free
2. Lavalier is worn on a clip on a shirt ( stage presentations ), on the hairline (broadway shows), or concealed under clothing (tv & film). They’re omnidirectional, so need to be close and in a relatively quiet environment.
3. Hand-held / mounted these are the typical mics from the pictures you see. They can be omni or uni or shotgun.

The goal is flawless audio from the start

An audience can shut their eyes, or look away from visuals, but they can’t shut their ears. We gotta make audio superb in everything. The only thing we can really do in the alteration of audio feeds / recordings is to remove data from the audio. We can’t photoshop it. As audio compresses for transfer through wires and even internet, it loses quality and clarity.

If you record with noisy background, echo, extra mouth noises, and you remove them in post, you’ll also be removing some of the good stuff that you want to share. No way around it.

Noise is everywhere

The A/C, your neighbors, helicopters, instruments, audio playback, your fridge can all make background noise. Ways to reduce it include unplugging and turning off anything noisy, wear headphones to hear audio you need to hear, plan things around quiet times, close windows, do things in places with heavy walls.

You want your face to be super close to the input device too, but if you breathe on the mic, you can make the microphone pop when you use plosives. Wind shields and pop guards can prevent your breath from making noise. Also, depending on how your mouth makes words, you might be able to change the position of a mic so it and your breath are in a long-distance relationship.

Echo sounds like it could be cool, but if you don’t have control over it, it sucks. It can also make a small room sound small and amateurish. Sound bounces like a billiard ball off hard surfaces at right angles. If the room you’re in is a cube made of marble, you’ll have a lot of echo. You wanna get weird angles and softness around you. I’ve recorded things in bed under a big blanket. It’s hot, but not echo-y!

Hard room fixes: don’t talk straight towards a wall talk at an angle. Put something soft behind the microphone so you’re talking either into the microphone or into that soft pile of towels. Talk quieter with the microphone closer. Put more things in the room that are soft or angled. If a sound bounces one time before coming back to the mic it’s stronger than if it bounces twice.

Microphone quality

Microphone quality matters more than you may be able to detect. Our brains add closure to sounds we hear. We cognitively fill the gap. If a brain is working too hard to imagine what’s not there, it might not pickup the message or the beauty of the sound that is there. If someone’s listening to your voice with background music or at double speed on a podcast, clarity will be super crucial to their enjoyment.

Good quality microphones…

• are sensitive and can pickup sounds easily
• have big dynamic range. That means they can hear low pitched and high pitched sounds.
• have balance in that range so that they don’t pickup one frequency more than another

Covid isn’t negatively affecting everyone in the entertainment industry, but some are left not knowing what to do now. If you’re that, this is that for you.

As I’m coaching entertainment pros thru this moment, I want them to thrive. I always want my clients to get way more from me than they pay me, so these are the three routes we go. Feel free to mix and match them too!

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“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar

In most categories of entertainment, there are a lot of candidates for every gig / job. So, we have trouble sticking out, or sticking in the mind of potential clients. It seems like we’re all coming at it from the same direction of “I’m good, use me.” That is a lottery approach instead of a strategy approach.

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The old stuff isn’t good because it’s old.

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Let’s hire robots!

Small business owners have trouble with automation and outsourcing. Let’s talk about automation — setting up systems to run themselves.

Entertainment companies are often small-profit-margin organizations who end up competing with larger-margin companies. Eg: a couple friends could go to a play or to a bar. Competing in this way means amusement companies need to get every leg up they can.

Automation can take the humanity out of entertainment and it can also do the opposite.

Over-automating

Some people are trying to save themselves all the time in the world. They want everything to be a hands-off system before it’s even a system. They want all the tools to do all the cool things tools do. I can fall victim to this.

Symptoms:

1. You pore over the latest productivity apps trying to find what’s new and next
2. You get dragged into ads that promise an all-in-one package or some efficiency
3. You hate paper
4. You spend time figuring out how to do something for the first time instead of doing it for the first time

Under-automating

Some people are stuck doing the tasks that are better done by machines. Machines are good at repetitive things and memorization (storage).

Symptoms:

1. Every task takes your brain
2. You’re using your mind to remember things like schedules, contact info, what you are doing, your goals, etc.
3. Your day to day has many easy tasks

This is better use of resources

I think of time, energy, money, etc as one collective of resources called “jellybeans”. Automation might not save you time, but it might save you a lot of decision fatigue, so overall may save you more jelly beans. Choosing the wrong automation could cost you jelly beans, so who has the jelly beans to really figure all this out?

Solve the problem at the right time

If you’re in the “over-automating” category, you might start a project with a perfection mindset of “what do I want this to look like at the end and how do I get there the fastest” If you’re in the “under” category, you can probably just jump into something and start going. Then, you keep doing it the same way for the duration.

The happy medium is to jump into a project. Start doing the next task. Then, when you know what the project is, and you know what tasks are required, sort thru the process and find repetitive and storage needs.

If you go to early, you’re gonna waste too much time trying to solve issues that might not even be issues. You might say “I’m going to need to organize thousands of clients” then you later realize that you get three clients that pay for your year of operations.

If you go too late, you could be totally drained, and have let a lot of work that fall aside — the work that only humans can do… the work that humans want from you!

Easy evaluation

The easiest way to assess your automation potential for stuff is to take inventory of your jelly-bean-heavy-tasks (JBHT) and then compare them to the value you provide. See, I’m starting with the tasks, not the tools.

• Look at your books and see where you spend all your money. Look at each one to see if there’s an automation solution that will save you money.
• Spend a week or a month tracking all the time you spend on your business. Figure out if there’s automation to save you time, even if it costs you money.
• Look for things that take your energy leave you exhausted.
• Keep a journal for a week and see what burns through your emotional currency where are the headaches, what drives you to a feeling of helplessness?
• There are a lot of other resources you can examine too, like social currency, equipment damage, etc.

You don’t want to automate your main value. If people come to you because of original thinking, you don’t want a robot to post quotes randomly on your instagram. You want to spend all your jelly beans on sharing original thoughts and ideally automate or outsource everything else.

For example Scot Nery’s Boobietrap

The main value we provide is curation, communications, and community. So, even though it takes a lot of time and emotions for a neurotic person like me to go thru act submissions, respond to emails, and write good comedy newsletters; I do it. Co-producer Meranda spends a lot of jelly beans on connecting with people and building the community. These things might feel repetitive, or like they don’t always warrant a human brain, but they do… if we don’t offer them, we don’t have anything proprietary to offer.

Here are some examples of automations

We do things with light automation like using an abbreviation app for repetitive chunks of text that we need to add to messages. When someone asks us how do they submit an act, or if i need to send a rejection email, or a piece of contact info, this is crucial.

I use Copia. It’s an app for keeping a clipboard history. Basically, you copy and paste something, then you copy and paste something else. If you wanna go back and paste that first thing again, it will store that for your easy access. It keeps a long history so you can move a bunch of chunks around to different things.

We use apple’s reminders for storing and syncing shopping lists. We use calendar syncing for day-of special todos. We use air table to store data that we need to share but doesn’t need to be constantly easily accessible. We use Asana for weekly repeating checklists.

We also have a heavy duty app that I built that organizes all the acts in our database and all our ticket buyers. It lets us send out emails to acts as soon as their booked with all their booking info. It sends them an email the week of the show to let them know what they need to do. It allows us to keep and organize the lineups for each week. It sends out a playbill of the show to everyone in attendance. It manages our staff and warns us if we’re low on staff. It helps us keep track of the diversity in our shows. We wouldn’t have been able to manage 5 years of weekly shows involving 30 volunteers per week without it. It would have been expensive if we had to pay to develop it.

We use Buffer for automatically posting to social media on a schedule. We create the posts ( communications are part of our value ) but Buffer schedules and distributes (scheduling, and repeating are not part of our value).

Repeat

The biggest gap companies face with automation is forgetting to reevaluate. You might have had a JBHT years ago that was too expensive to automate, but maybe now it’s costing you more jelly beans, maybe your jelly beans are worth more, or maybe the automation solutions are cheaper.

Got an email from someone fresh outta college who is about to do some great stuff as a writer. Here’s a basic path toward picking next steps. I walk entertainment companies through this even when their career is established. It’s really powerful to reevaluate the purpose of what we’re doing and get on a simpler trajectory instead of shotgunning creativity out into space.

This is kind of an open letter to the writer, but I hope it’s useful as a worksheet for anyone open to doing some rewarding work for their entertainment company.

You can set out on a total plan in a day. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Whatever you do will help you a ton, as long as you make bold specific choices. I promise.

Pick the mission.

1. Why did you first want to be a writer?
2. What is a piece of writing you envy or want to match?

What’s at the core of the first experience and what’s at the core of the piece of work of your dreams?

Your mission / reason might sound like “Writing accesses imagination in a way that breaks down barriers and mobilizes real change within people.”

Pick a direction.

This is your initial trajectory. Narrow focus. Super Narrow! Not “I want to be a professional writer.” something more like “I want to write books about how technology can preserve nature in California”

Make your direction sustainable.

As the world changes, you’ll want your assets to become more valuable, not less. Books will probably become less valuable and writers with them. You will want your direction to be proprietary (something someone can’t take from you and make it with the same perceived value for cheaper).

So maybe it changes to “I would like to be a thought leader and influential copy writer who improves adoption of California’s environment saving technologies.”

You might notice that it’s not “writer” as a job title and that might feel like a “hold on a minute!” way of thinking. This direction choosing can be a little surprising once you realize that your mission doesn’t align directly with the job title you originally applied. Nothing is lost. You’ve just improved on all the work you’ve done so far.

Freelance or corporation

You don’t have to decide at this point, but down the road, you’ll have to figure out if you’re going to be by yourself ( you build your brand based on you), or you become anonymous in a group of your own creation. it will be easier to figure out once you’ve experimented a little and adjusted your direction

3 month project : Build assets, serve your audience, improve workflow

Work every day for 90 days. 45% on assets. 45% on audience. 10% on observation and flow. So, if you have 5 hours per day to commit, you’re gonna do 2:15 on assets and audience each and :30 on organizing.

Your assets are the things your business is going to use moving forward.

Hopefully they’ll add value to your company for years. As a thought-leader, your assets are knowledge, ability to share that knowledge, and proof of both.

You might decide you’re going to blog every day a research topic that interests you. Every blog post has to be about California, technology, environment.

Look at you! You’re already doing your dream! You wanted to be a writer. Now you’re writing every day.

You’re a writer!

It’s best if your assets are proveable.

The blog is not the asset. The asset you’re building here is your experience, knowledge, and understanding. The blog is the proof of your assets for the outside world.

If you are a performer, it could be writing/ rewriting your show. If you’re a game designer, it could be making a game. It’s helpful to make your assets something you can show to your audience at some point. Either the physical proof, a case study, or maybe quotes from clients that proves you have great assets.

Serve your audience

Figure out who an audience might be for you. What kind of people will be able to pay you enough down the road for the thing you want to do? Maybe your audience options are civil engineers, environmental technology innovators, politicians.

Pick one of them and start serving them. The way you serve them doesn’t have to be the way you’re building assets. It doesn’t even have to be in your normal skillset.

You could find all the mayors in california. Figure out what they need individually or as a group and give them something great.

Your three month project could be to setup a way to aggregate mayoral news from every city and make a news source that’s for mayors to see what everyone else is doing. Make the feed compelling and make it a celebration of mayors so everyone wants to compete and get news up there about them (not just environmental news). If they get a flattering article, they can share it. That makes them feel and look good and maybe helps them get reelected. You’re serving them where their needs are.

Workflow

To start, these two above projects have to be on mission with building assets and audience. That will make you feel more flowy. It will give your work purpose and it will be easier once you get derailed to re-rail. You’re not doing this stuff because it’s fun or because it’s bringing money in the moment. You’re doing it because it’s part of a higher purpose.

Think about what hours you’re putting in. think about whether you’re benefiting from your trajectory. If you have notes about big picture, or things to do later, jot them as notes to your future self. Don’t jump in to new commitments until you’ve gotten thru this period.

Adjusting

You can adjust and you will adjust. Maybe after this 3 months you’ll decide to throw away all your work completely… but you gotta get through the grind of it. You have to let yourself feel like it’s not working, then find what works better. You’re not just building assets and audience. You’re building a muscle for taking responsibility for the direction of your work. You’re heading toward a place where you are not relying on luck or privilege. You have some control and that feeling of agency toward your mission will be the most empowering thing you do with creative work.

Accountability

I recommend working on this with one or more people. This is very hard stuff to stick to. It’s scary, boring, and off-putting, but it’s going infuse your work with so much more value than waiting for magic to happen.

It’s really good to have someone else sign off before you make a trajectory change. That way you know you won’t be riding whims. You’ll be making strong choices based on your mission and that will give emotional fuel to all your work.

Not what you wanted

Creating a news site is not your dream. I know. Figuring out how to do the layout, the publishing, the promotion, the communication with mayors. This is craziness. Here’s why, though. There are about 500 cities in California. You could become a god-send to 20% of the mayors. 100 powerful people who are grateful that you exist and are waiting to be served the next thing you have to offer.

You’re going to have to do other things than write no matter what. Do you want the other things to be helping people, or do you want them to be mastering the food stamp system, or writing rejected cover letters to publishers, or applying for newspaper jobs, or interning at buzzfeed?

Let’s say in 4 months, you have a great keynote speech put together based on your blog writings that’s about bringing small communities together to affect environmental change. These 100 mayors help you get 100 speaking gigs for $1000/ea (which may be a low fee). You just made $100,000. I’m not trying to make you promises and I’m not focussed on a specific result. I’m trying to show you how the work can be channeled toward your mission.

The Goal is working on the mission

The point of this work is not to make a perfect plan and execute it perfectly and get a paycheck or have a measurable goal at the end. It’s all an experiment. Experiments never fail. They either prove something, or show that more experimentation is needed.

The stipulation, though there isn’t a measurable goal, you have to at least guess at a market that is going to pay off in the future and work toward that.

No matter what, you’re gonna gain…

1. Improve your value through asset building
2. Clarify your focus by getting in the trenches and seeing what really works
3. Improve your value through audience building
4. Learn a lot about audience building
5. Trying to manage an entire career with all the issues and goals and stuff is really frustrating. Doing something simple like this can help you demonstrate real progress and give you lots of confidence to continue. As a freelancer, this can be one of your most valuable assets.