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Ma16-NOTES.pdf
(The below text version of the notes is for search purposes and convenience. See the PDF version for proper formatting such as bold, italics, etc., and graphics where applicable. Copyright: 2022 Retraice, Inc.)
Ma16: November 2020 to February 2022
Margin by Retraice^1
On productivity while not producing.
Air date: Wednesday, 2nd Mar. 2022, 4:30 PM Eastern/US.
Production scripts
We haven't published in over a year, and the best way to explain why is that we've been building a podcast assembly line. But that's only part of the reason for delay. The other part is personal stuff.
For about three months (Nov. '20 to Feb. '21) I worked on production scripts: everything that could be automated in our segment production process.
Labor saves cash
Then, we (personally) decided to move across the country.
That took a lot more time because of the business, i.e. because we're on one income and therefor Jeff's labor saves us cash.
The economic reality is that (almost) anything you, as a founder, can do to save your personal cash, you must do.
Delusions and postponed activity
Even when production is not possible, the business lives. Turning it off for a while, like it's an appliance, is not a thing.
Most of our overhead is not terribly expensive, and turning it all off and back on again would be a lot of hassle.
Our cash burn rate, at zero publishing, is about $2,400 per year; at full-speed publishing, it's about $3,600 per year, so about $100 per month difference.
It is not really possible to stop a business once it's `launched'--or even earlier than that. In fact, we weren't even `off the ground' or `launched' until our first paywalled segment, which was March 1st, 2022 (a few days ago). This wasn't an accident; our business can't credibly do a sale until something is not obtainable without buying it from us. And we didn't reach that point quickly.
And the whole time we were in this transition state we were planning to publish here and there, somehow. This turned out to be a delusion, mostly because of the physical and temporal overhead of live and video production (as opposed to just basic audio / podcast production).
A one-man, thinking business
Life postponed the activity of the business, but not the thinking. This is crucial in our business, which is significantly affected by thoughts; we are less affected by, say, commodity prices, labor supply, etc.
Spark plugs, transmission fluid, oil
In Feb. 2021, I left the production scripts in a state that made it much harder to start them up again after eight months had passed. Even though everything I'd build worked near-perfectly, it took a lot of time for me to remember or discover the very few, crucial things that I had left in a non-ready state.
Oh, and accounting
In the middle of doing that restart work, I realized we needed to change our accounting system--and that it would be largely roll-your-own, which meant a month of extra work.
The assembly line
Our business resembles manufacturing cars: you don't just build the car, you build the assembly line that makes the mass-production possible. The car alone is not very valuable.
Btw, the holy grail of podcasting is to figure out how to make a great podcast, which is hard, not just a great episode/segment, which is much easier.
Btw, almost all of the complexity of our publishing rig (and process) is caused by the live and video elements. Good-old-fashioned podcast production is easy. I know this because I did a simple, high-quality podcast test without those things, and it was stupid easy.
Owning vs. being a business
Ma15^2 mentioned that I was having trouble with my voice; that problem has not gotten worse, mercifully. But it has made us realize how dependent Retraice is on the fragility of my particular body, which is a bad dependency to have. We're working on fixing this.
Assumption no more
Ma15's other `threat' was our business assumptions. Chief among them: Will people subscribe? As of yesterday (March 1st, 2022), we're testing that assumption.
References
Margin (2020/11/25). Ma15: Two Threats. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/ma15 Retrieved 28th Feb. 2022.
Footnotes
^1 https://www.retraice.com/margin
^2 Margin (2020/11/25)
View all episodes
By Retraice, Inc.(The below text version of the notes is for search purposes and convenience. See the PDF version for proper formatting such as bold, italics, etc., and graphics where applicable. Copyright: 2022 Retraice, Inc.)
Ma16: November 2020 to February 2022
Margin by Retraice^1
On productivity while not producing.
Air date: Wednesday, 2nd Mar. 2022, 4:30 PM Eastern/US.
Production scripts
We haven't published in over a year, and the best way to explain why is that we've been building a podcast assembly line. But that's only part of the reason for delay. The other part is personal stuff.
For about three months (Nov. '20 to Feb. '21) I worked on production scripts: everything that could be automated in our segment production process.
Labor saves cash
Then, we (personally) decided to move across the country.
That took a lot more time because of the business, i.e. because we're on one income and therefor Jeff's labor saves us cash.
The economic reality is that (almost) anything you, as a founder, can do to save your personal cash, you must do.
Delusions and postponed activity
Even when production is not possible, the business lives. Turning it off for a while, like it's an appliance, is not a thing.
Most of our overhead is not terribly expensive, and turning it all off and back on again would be a lot of hassle.
Our cash burn rate, at zero publishing, is about $2,400 per year; at full-speed publishing, it's about $3,600 per year, so about $100 per month difference.
It is not really possible to stop a business once it's `launched'--or even earlier than that. In fact, we weren't even `off the ground' or `launched' until our first paywalled segment, which was March 1st, 2022 (a few days ago). This wasn't an accident; our business can't credibly do a sale until something is not obtainable without buying it from us. And we didn't reach that point quickly.
And the whole time we were in this transition state we were planning to publish here and there, somehow. This turned out to be a delusion, mostly because of the physical and temporal overhead of live and video production (as opposed to just basic audio / podcast production).
A one-man, thinking business
Life postponed the activity of the business, but not the thinking. This is crucial in our business, which is significantly affected by thoughts; we are less affected by, say, commodity prices, labor supply, etc.
Spark plugs, transmission fluid, oil
In Feb. 2021, I left the production scripts in a state that made it much harder to start them up again after eight months had passed. Even though everything I'd build worked near-perfectly, it took a lot of time for me to remember or discover the very few, crucial things that I had left in a non-ready state.
Oh, and accounting
In the middle of doing that restart work, I realized we needed to change our accounting system--and that it would be largely roll-your-own, which meant a month of extra work.
The assembly line
Our business resembles manufacturing cars: you don't just build the car, you build the assembly line that makes the mass-production possible. The car alone is not very valuable.
Btw, the holy grail of podcasting is to figure out how to make a great podcast, which is hard, not just a great episode/segment, which is much easier.
Btw, almost all of the complexity of our publishing rig (and process) is caused by the live and video elements. Good-old-fashioned podcast production is easy. I know this because I did a simple, high-quality podcast test without those things, and it was stupid easy.
Owning vs. being a business
Ma15^2 mentioned that I was having trouble with my voice; that problem has not gotten worse, mercifully. But it has made us realize how dependent Retraice is on the fragility of my particular body, which is a bad dependency to have. We're working on fixing this.
Assumption no more
Ma15's other `threat' was our business assumptions. Chief among them: Will people subscribe? As of yesterday (March 1st, 2022), we're testing that assumption.
References
Margin (2020/11/25). Ma15: Two Threats. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/ma15 Retrieved 28th Feb. 2022.
Footnotes
^1 https://www.retraice.com/margin
^2 Margin (2020/11/25)