December 2018 started it.
- CM was a bit lost.
- He was not succeeding.
- Wrote an article for WIRED based on his Yale lecture.
- This exposed him to different available platforms for membership, so he asked himself, should I start a membership?
- Talked to media establishments and agencies and said he wants to be a better writer, should he work for them?
- They said, you have an audience, you know what you want to write about, and you have a lot of agency, why not lean into that?
- Writers inside newsrooms actually want to be independent writers with audiences.
- Decided to launch a membership program.
- How he launched it
- Simple. Treat it as an MVP.
- Memberships: Memberful. No to constraints of Patreon and Substack.
- Email: Campaign Monitor (Buttondown? Ghost?)
- Site: Hugo (11ty?)
- Launched in January 2019.
- Depressing. He didn’t get to a hundred in day 1.
- Not successful.
- He launched it without really knowing what it will be for.
- How CM got over depression.
- Get over it. You already had people giving you a grant.
- Fight for each sub.
- After getting his mental doubts, he planned his first big walk in May 2019.
- Nakasendō
- SMS publishing experiment
- Established rules for walks
- Biggest insight: Membership payments = Permission to do what you want to do
- You don’t need publication, book deals, etc.
- Design problem during the walk: asynchronous vs real-time communication
- Walk rules
- No media
- No social networks
- No podcasts
- Consolidate collected data every day
- Publish SMS ever night (image + text)
- Shoot portraits before 10 am (you just connect with people)
- How do you share all of this while still being present?
- SMS publishing
- Benefits
- Bigger, more thoughtful “loop” (~3 months “wide”)
- Context affects intimacy
- Obvious contract
- Not pulled out of the moment
- Leverage global network access
- Wrote his walk in Wired, which did good.
- Consider the size of your “loops”
- Most importantly: An object, a totem, a memento (should do more books)
- Played with video
- Published pop-up walk as video
- Just used iPhone with earpods + FilMic app that allowed earpods to be used as mic
- 2020 Video
- Pandemic inspired
- Boring livestreams
- Walk updates
- Get used with camera and tools
- No travel, so just do the book.
- Thought about book design again.
- Launched Kissa by Kissa August 2020.
- $100 per copy
- 1000 copies
- Expected to sell only 300 copies
- Sold out in 2 days
- Craigstarter
- Better than kickstarter
- Must have coupons
- Crowdfunding + Shipping all in one place = Shopify
- 18 months from launching, CM was only able to articulate his goal.
- SP Purpose: A continious and rigorous production of book-shaped projects (projects that support the books, lead to books, or the book projects themselves)
- He used this purpose to say yes to opportunities that aligned with it and say no to those that didn’t align.
- Through the money he made from the memberships, he invested in technology to make the videos.
- The documentary led to 200 book sales ($200,000).
- He invested $10,000 in equipment.
- Year 4
- Using his accumulated research and fieldwork, he can have ~4 more books he could do now just by sitting in the next six months.
- Leverage systems and infrastructures
- Years
- 1: MVP, does this work? is there interest? what can I produce?
- 2: Product market fit (i.e., books and memberships)
- 3: Improve the infrastructures that support and are around the book production nicer (printing, video, etc.)
- 4: To leverage these systems to produce a solid body of work.