Author here! I didn’t mean to write a comprehensive overview of Roam, I was just curious about the marketing decisions of products that attain cult status. I get that this is not nearly the most important aspect of Roam. Just a little thing I was personally interested in!
Author here! The entire piece contains the logic that supports the conclusion at the end. You're right that the recession will hurt them, but on balance, I think in the long run the premium short-form video format will be here to stay.
The third paragraph has a footnote stating that the 3 para above were "heavily inspired" by the "Eat Dirt" chapter.
I'm assuming you didn't see this first footnote.
And a bit later, I do link to the manual as well (which is what you saw, I guess)
Not my intention to copy Duncan's work. A big red disclaimer hurts readability, and not attributing the source would indeed be plagiarism. I think I struck the right balance.
I use that example because I love how it shows the concept I was trying to explain pretty well. It's not the main point of the post.
Thank you! This is very thoughtful. I'm definitely taking some time and thankfully not under too much financial stress. But honestly I actually feel really fine. This happened a couple weeks ago and I have had some time to process it. Writing the post was super cathartic.
Actually we had a pretty detailed financial model for how we expected to get to profitability! We currently have ~1,200 subscribers, and about half are paying us $1.99/mo (our old price point) and the other half is paying $3.99/mo. Our growth model is based on people sharing our content, and so we can predict pretty well how many new customers we'll get every time we post something new. With a $15k monthly content budget (a couple writers, network of freelance designers) we were pretty sure we'd be able to bend the growth curve to the point where we'd reach profitability (~15k subscribers) in about 10 months, assuming modest improvements in conversion rates and share rates (we'd obviously be doing a ton of experiments to move these numbers).
At the end of the day, investors weren't convinced, so you certainly have a point! There may have been something seriously wrong with the plan. But I challenge your assertion that we'd need "big growth just to survive". Yeah we'd need pretty good growth, for sure. But not "unrealistic, crazy unlikely" growth.
And on the upside, once we got there, all growth would be pretty much pure margins after that! We don't think we'd need to dramatically increase our investment in content.
I'd assume most investors are not really interested in you reaching profitability. In fact it's probably a negative for them.
What they want of for you to reach a high valuation which allows them to get a +10x return on their investment. What they want is for you to need more money from them in order to survive, so if they believe in the play they can increase their stake.
At some point they want liquidity. But that doesn't have much to do with your profitability.
Honestly, you probably know better than me. But this has been my limited experience.
"But I challenge your assertion that we'd need 'big growth just to survive'"
You say this while literally telling me that your big hope was to get a pile of money so that you could "bend" your growth curve towards reaching bare profitability after about another year. When would a realistic assessment of your actual growth curve say you'd reach that point? Was there enough customer base that you could actually reach to get to that point, much less beyond?
I won't call your plans "dumb", but the whole startup approach is one that almost always fails, even compared to starting other businesses. It's really hard to call it "smart".
I feel like your pricing is too low, and you needed to be closer to Audible prices.
I feel like your marketing plan relied on too many perfect things to happen. You should also consider that the more you exploit a specific marketing channel, the less it tends to work. I think it's a tough sell to convince investors to put money into something that will only get you to your targets if your conversion and share rates improve.
