Discussion
In all three cases, I need to really figure out what they can do that will be beneficial to our long term plans, and that I can trust them with, or I need to figure out how to help them transition into other roles.
I do not know what the answer is. I don't even have the beginnings of a clue.
The biggest things that I need to do are:
- Figure out how to make our vintage toy sales justify dad's wages, or figure out how to get dad involved in something else that generates revenue or otherwise supports our goals. (This might actually be possible. I need to really think about it.)
- Re-task the other two folks towards projects that are closer to their skillsets and interests and more likely to generate revenue or otherwise support our goals. (What? I'll have to think about it. It almost certainly involves getting them out of NEHI.)
- Figure out the quickest path towards making NEHI profitable, or at least sustaining (I think we're already on that path, it just doesn't feel like it some days.)
- Spend some time really thinking about what happens next with #NETV
Really and truly I believe that what we're doing at NEHI and NETV are vital to the future.
When I talk about what we're doing in each of these endeavors, that might seem silly, but I believe it.
So I'm going to talk about what we do, and then I'm goign to talk about why I think it's important.
#NETV is a television network and streaming service based out of Ellijay Georgia. It's Community Media in the kind that I wrote about here: https://communitymedia.network
We have a roku channel and a peertube server and we produce a lot of local content including music gear review shows, sitcoms, and political video essays. We also archive a lot of historical material from film. I've written about this stuff extensively, and I'm not going to re-hash it all here.
#NEHI is our haha only serious name for our manufacturing efforts. We're running a machine shop and making injection molded plastic using environmentally sustainable and horizontally scalable processes.
Most of what we've done so far has been toys, most of what we'll do in the future is toys.
I believe these two things are vital for the same reason:
When we make a toy, that toy supplants something made by a distant corporation using media owned by Disney. When someone watches our news coverage or one of the public domain cartoons we've archived or whatever, that's half an hour they didn't spend watching something owned by Sinclair ( https://communitymedia.video/w/kJ3dojouKA3G5onEaKq1Vu )
In both cases, I also believe there's the potential for each of these things to be a significant driver of revenue.
The toys we make for ourselves and sell directly make us money directly.
The toys we make for other people make us money from manufacturing.
NETV has lots of room for local advertising which, if we can strike the right balance, serves to make us money while also supporting our local economy, which tends to have a positive reinforcement effect. (Money spent in the local economy tends to circulate in the local economy.)
We're working to provide alternatives to things produced by major corporations that extract money out of our local economy.
We're working to provide alternatives to media produced by major corporations that inject ideologies into our local community.
I've been running NETV for several years now and it still doesn't work as well as I'd like.
We don't make shows as quickly as I'd like. We don't make as many shows as I'd like. Too many of the things we make are still in a video essay or talk show format, and I really want to do less of those things and more fiction.
But I could fix all of those problems with a few more people.
I just can't afford to put a few more people on it, because we don't have enough advertising revenue or other forms of revenue.
I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out what to do about this. I have some ideas, but I haven't been able to execute on them yet. I'll talk about them in a bit.
I genuinely believe NEHI has the potential to create an entirely new market segment in toys.
We're still learning, but we're learning quickly and we've made a lot of progress and our toys will keep getting better.
Every time we solve a problem we get a few days closer to being able to produce thousands of high quality action figures in a day. (Right now, we top out at hundreds of medium quality figurines most of the time.
While we're capable of faster and higher quality, we have to get more equipment online and more things built before we'll be able to *demonstrate* that, you know?
So I've been focused on letting us get the new equipment online and develop the new techniques, and generally improve our processes, rather than on making things and selling them.
It feels like we're days or weeks away from faster, and then days or weeks away again from better, and then days or weeks away again from consistent.
But there have been so many road blocks (equipment failures, staffing changes, having one of the crew unceremoniously quit his job a few weeks after starting because he started having an affair with a co-worker/my best friend's partner, different equipment failing. Plastics behaving in unexpected ways, clients coming to us with Big Assumptions that we struggle to break through) that I'm having a hard time remaining optimistic.
There are very few things left that can go wrong! From here, it should just be that we make things and we keep making things.
It's good! It's just slower than I had hoped.
I will be less despondent when the things that we've been working on start to pay off.
But in the meantime, I have to keep examining them and trying to determine if I'm wasting my time, you know?
I haven't yet figured out what my dead-drop threshold is on either platform, but I think that, if we aren't sustaining on NETV by March, I will need to significantly change what that looks like and how I'm spending my effort.
I don't want to do that!
I mean, I guess I do. I want to make it better and more.
But if I can't figure out how to make it financially sustainable, I will need to significantly cut back how much energy time and funding we're putting into it.
@ajroach42 historically, the big paycheck for toy manufacturing comes from licensing. A few hundred medium-quality toys per day could work well for a YouTuber or Streamer merch drop...
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