I’d like to share some of the insights which motivated me to deliberately, willfully and consciously choose to spend a considerable number of years of my life enduring the hardships of building a startup business from scratch. What motivated me to found Kaplak? What motivates me to work on Kaplak, each and every day?
There are a number of avenues to take to answer these questions. One of these is Dreams of a Diva (org. Danish title Diva Drømme), a documentary film I produced/directed in 2005. This trailer for the film gives you an idea of what kind of film this is :
The film was produced under the FilmTrain program, and therefore, to a certain extent, sponsored as part of my participation in this program. FilmTrain was financed as an Interreg IIIA project, which basically means it was funded by the EU. It was a cross-border Danish-German project of which one particular objective was to try and develop and keep young and independent media professionals in the regions of Odense/Funen and Kiel/Schleswig, rather than “lose them” to the big cities of Copenhagen and Hamburg.
I’ve never been very good at thinking about how to market any film I produced. In short, because I never cared. Every current project interested me, and older ones were soon shelved, after airings on local or national television, or screenings at festivals. None of my films have attracted or tried to attract a mainstream audience. I made films about subjects I liked and which interested me, despite the fact I never earned more than a little on any of them. In 2004 I met Sofie Krog, which is a world-class puppeteer, and she hired me to do a promotional video for her. I knew already then, that it would be great to eventually do a longer film about her and her show, and decided to make the film the following year.
Much hard work later, the film had a blast of a premiere in a local movie theatre in Odense in January 2006, with an invited audience of about 100 people. The following week, when the film stood it’s ground in the theatre on it’s own merits, it attracted as many as two paying moviegoers, of which one was my aunt. And this was after what I’d say was decent local press coverage, on television, in radio and in the printed press.
Needless to say, I was a bit disappointed. Some rational analysis later, this was hardly surprising, even though we’d hoped for more. The film had a niche subject, puppeteering, which was little known about locally, featured an up-and-coming star in this field, which were little known outside theatrical circles – and to top it, it was a documentary film. Apparently, documentaries never do very well in theatres (with the rare exception).
This was what I call an eye-opener to me. What may have been latent knowledge before then, was then crystal. It was clear to me, that I couldn’t rely on any traditional distribution channel, such as movie theatres, for my work – and nor for financing my work, if I wanted to continue to do the kind of non-mainstream creative works I wanted to do.
At the same time I released the film on the bittorrent-indexsite The Pirate Bay, from where the torrent spread to other torrent-indexsites. Also the official FilmTrain DVD (which was free) was later leaked to the bittorrent network. While none of these files were ever big hits on the torrent networks, the traffic they brought from as far away as Greece and Japan revealed new avenues of distribution. Gargantuan amounts of data were transported to far away places – not with the speed of light – but comparatively hazzle-free, for such a young technology. It was in fact possible to distribute large amounts of data to the other end of the world with comparative ease and very little cost. It was clear, there were problems. Lots of problems. At one point I managed to send 13 GB or so across the Atlantic. It took 14 days or so to do it, though. With just two people connected, this was not the economical method of doing this, but it still amazed me. Shipping this amount of data from a home computer to another through the internet was unthinkable just 5-10 years ago. Eventually I got tired of seeding myself, which basically made the torrents unavailable (and they are so now, not just this film, but most of the stuff I put up there). But the possibility existed. We “just” needed some method to pay for the bandwidth and hosting. We needed to make it even easier.
I can’t possibly go back to directing and producing a film, before I get to a point where I can rely on the architectures of it’s distribution to actually bring the film to those interested in it, and give me a decent living from it, which helps finance my work. Sending a film in 100 physical copies to 100 different film festivals around the world can’t do this for me, it’s only further expenses. Now, we have a global, open architecture of distribution at our feet. We “just” need to tweak and improve the tools at our hands to enable us to create new business models.
I can’t publish my work online without a method of making a living from what I do. I found back then, that there were a ton of videosites and p2p networks which enabled internet users to distribute their stuff. Yet, amazingly none took seriously aim to crack what I increasingly saw as “the niche producer’s problem”; financing, and what’s going to get a niche production financing : increased and targeted visibility towards it’s niche market. I also found that there were lots of methods to put advertising on one’s website – and earn a dime doing so. But what if you don’t have a website? What if you don’t want to become entangled in online advertising, but would rather go about your business doing what you do well? Or what if you can attract so little traffic, that it isn’t really worth your while? I found none which were interested in appealing to niche markets, on what I refer to as “the slim end” of the long tail. This was the situation Kaplak was founded to remedy. Not just for myself, but for anyone for whom this resonates.
A local department of a political party of which I am a member (never mind which party) had a discussion rolling some time ago concerning spam mail, which led our web editor Rasmus Larsen to ask a few questions concerning Kaplak :
Let’s say that I am organizing an independently financed political forum on the web, with a range of interesting articles by a mixed group of connected people – some writing small newspaper pieces, others longer dissertations. [...] The purpose is not to generate a profit, but 1) to create attention around the webforum as a supplier of meaningful political articles, and 2) to inspire and influence the activities of the target groups, as a kind of prolonged think tank activity.
If there’s an article which supply something innovative on integration policies, it needs to get out in some way to all relevant people who’re already occupied with the subject and are active online. It could be high profile debaters and thinkers, people within different political parties, which leads particular workgroups, certain students and researchers at universities etc.
Now I face these challenges :
How do I get this article out to the target groups described here, without a firm grasp of who and where they are?
How do I make sure, they won’t consider it spam or unimportant?
How do I get it out to the target groups, which I haven’t even considered exists?
These questions hit the nail on a crucial challenge also for Kaplak : “Search” pre-conditions a pre-knowledge, a core of conscious information, which makes someone able to search for something. How do we reach the other someones, who are interested in what we do, without knowing who they are, and they not knowing who we are?
The answer is deceptively simple, yet incredibly hard work. The answer is hyperlinks. Most people don’t realize how important they are. A search engine, for instance, is really nothing but a very advanced index of hyperlinks and hyperlinked webpages. So to be visible for the someones who do search for you, if they know who you are or what your “product” is – let’s imagine you manage to get that information to them by some other means – you have to build a strong interlinked system of hyperlinks, pointing to your site from related sites, networks, communities, blogs etc., which will make search engines better pick up your site and rate it correctly and appropriately.
You can use special techniques often referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to optimize your visibility for people who search for you on the web. But your efforts will be most efficient, if 1) your target group know beforehand that you exist or already are looking for what you offer, or 2) you can define precisely or near precisely, who your target group is and what they will search for.
The bottom line is still, however, links, links, links. A well placed link in a good spot will direct the right kind of people to your product or message.
So what is ‘a good spot’? I’ll discuss this in a second.
Concerning the questions about how recipients won’t consider your message or product ’spam’, and how to reach groups you haven’t considered existed, I’d like to flip the questions around a bit. In other words, what will recipients consider spam? And how do you reach people, who haven’t even considered your existence?
To the first, clearly most people consider unsolicited mail spam. Information they seek out themselves, are motivated for and have accepted to receive is not spam. If you want your message out, you have to find a way to reach people where this is the case or seems to be the case. The second point has really the same answer. In order to reach people, who don’t know you exist, you have to create a situation, where they seek you out themselves. So how do you do this?
You find out what the good spots are. Get your hyperlinks to the places where you find people who are potentially interested in your message and won’t consider it irrelevant.
At first, this may seem like an impossible task, especially considering the enormous growth of the web. But if one reconsiders, there’s good reason to praise this further atomization of the internet. The growth of the number of sites in the world also means, that there’s a much greater variety and finer segmenting of target groups. If you can define them right and precisely enough, that is. Segments can be anything on the web which has an audience or some point of communication. They can be website communities, but need not be. They need even not be on the web – they could also be mailing lists, intranets or darknets, i.e. closed p2p networks. A segment can be as small as the group of friends around a Facebook profile, or as large as Barack Obamas following on Twitter.
To describe and predict segments like these are exceedingly and increasingly difficult to do from any central point of view (although any SEO will certainly try). This is why we need to utilize local forces and filters (by means of “peer production”), which will help decide for us, what kind of segments will find what pieces of information. Local peers have what we don’t : the expertise in knowing their communities and segments much more precisely than we do. Connecting with these mediators is how we find ‘the good spots’.
In a way, this is what is already happening now all over the internet. An atomization followed by more precise forms of segmenting and reaching audiences and markets. There are a lot of affiliate programs and products such as Google AdWords/AdSense which help mediators make these connections. But in Kaplak we don’t see really efficient solutions which helps the producers on the very slim end of the long tail, because these customers are not really the concern of most market players operating on the web.
What we propose at Kaplak is (among other things) to introduce a capital bonus (i.e. kaplak) to those peers who successfully connect a niche product with a niche market. This, supported by other tools, will help speed up the connecting of products with their markets in online niche contexts and generate larger margins for our customers – as well as for the mediators.
Thomas Magnussen is a British-Danish actor with a voice talent. His first job was a minor part in Tom Hanks’ tv-series Band of Brothers (2001), and since then his work has been a mix of theatrical plays, voice work and a number of roles in film and television. He has done a few international commercials. On his website, Thomas uses this video to introduce himself :
Thomas was kind enough to send me a quicktime file of the film, which I uploaded to YouTube (whose true merits we discussed briefly here), because I think it is important to show the video here as well. When you expressly put a text, an image or a video (like in this case) into a new context, it makes it stand out in a new way and helps create new meaning. And create meaning is what we want to do, because this creates value for this particular spot on the internet. I’m surprised, with Thomas’ resume, that I couldn’t find him on YouTube or in other places, because this kind of activity helps build traffic for his website, and it doesn’t cost anything.
Kaplak : Can you tell us a little about yourself and your niche business? How did you get involved with your line of work?
Thomas Magnussen (TM) : I am an actor, trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, working freelance in both theatre and films. I have several years of experience in doing various voicework such as: Documentary speaks, cartoon dubbing, voiceovers and commercial speaks. As I am bi-lingual English-Danish I’m equally skilled in both languages, and therefore work in both.
Kaplak : What kind of digital product do you produce (if any)?
TM : The digital products I produce are primarily the above mentioned voice related works, but I would be open to any idea which could involve acting related jobs, such as e-learning products for instance.
Kaplak : What constitute the greatest opportunity for your business on the internet?
TM : The greatest opportunity the internet offers me is that I can reach out to potentiel clients/employers in every part of the world by simply being visible via my website.
Kaplak : What are the greatest challenge?
TM : The greatest challenge is to find out where to focus my attention and how to get people to find out that I exist.
As an actor, Thomas is a hired gun. He is primarily a freelancer. The main portion of his work is done for clients, i.e. other creative producers and companies. Even when hired by a theatre, jobs are per project and run for a limited time. In several respects, this makes him different from the hobby-oriented “just for fun” niche producer and the professional-level producer we’ve met earlier on this blog.
First, he doesn’t usually own the digital end products he helps create. There could be exceptions to this, and surely there’s a lot of convergence happening, where a one day freelancer may be a producer on his own terms the other day (I’ve worked like that myself for years). As a “classic” freelancer though, one doesn’t usually gain rights to the work produced, but more often has to give them up.
Second, Thomas’ primary problem is visibility. But not towards people who buy the end digitial product (still, we keep out all points about convergence for now), but towards his clients, the producers all over the world, who want the product he offers. In other words, to get in touch with the producers who will want to hire him, if they knew he existed.
To sum up, it’s not the visibility for “end customers”, transport of data og payments which are Thomas’ challenges. In this sense, at first glance, he’s not an obvious Kaplak customer. But still he’s a very attractive customer for Kaplak. Why? Because he has a website! And he has something to sell, besides his acting product.
Thomas’ website is right now not much more but a showcase of his previous work, a curriculum vitae and some contact information. But it is also (or could be) an entry point to Thomas’ fan base or network. These people are valuable customers for the products, which Thomas’ acting efforts help produce, and possibly also for other types of related products. Imagine, that Thomas could help sell one of his recent projects, i.e. James Barclay’s next feature film Aurum, via his website. Imagine that the entire cast on this film (most actors have their own webpages) could help sell the film via their websites. Not only would this be great marketing news for the producer, but could also help provide a little extra for each actor.
Kogt i Roen is a Danish comedy band based in Skive, a town situated in northwestern Jutland in Denmark. The band name is difficult to translate directly. It is Danish slang which could imply that the band members have stayed out too long in the sun… So far the band have made three CD’s of songs and acts, of which all tracks are available from their website.
Mikkel Christensen, who incidentally also run the hosting company which hosts Kaplak.com, is a member of the band, and we caught him between two jobs to get his take on what kind of project Kogt i Roen is.
Kaplak : Can you tell us a little about yourself, your niche community and/or business?
Mikkel Christensen (MC) : Our music is solely for fun. We basically want to have some fun and want to share our joy with others. If we can get people to “donate” a few Danish kroner each time they download our music, it only makes us happy. We don’t expect to get rich from it. We call our genre for Standup Rock. I think we spend no more than a few weeks every year on our hobby.
My company is the complete opposite. We are professionals and among the best. We don’t compromise with quality, and when we engage in something, we do it wholeheartedly, or not at all.
Kaplak : How did you get involved with your community/business?
MC : I really don’t remember. I have been in this business since my early teen-days.
Kaplak : What kind of digital product do you produce (if any)?
MC : We produce digital entertainment :)
Kaplak : What constitute the greatest opportunity for your business on the internet? What is the greatest challenge?
MC : Nothing really, we don’t expect to earn any profit from our music but if the opportinuity emerges we will certainly take advantage of it.
The first thing that strikes me from Mikkel’s answers is that Kogt i Roen is a completely different type of niche producer, in comparison with DigDoc Film Production, which we met last week. Where DigDoc is a professional “expert-driven” company working hard to create documentaries which do sell, Kogt i Roen is a completely hobby-based project, which do not critically need to earn money on their music and acts.
We’ve seen, that DigDoc’s end products were directly and entirely digital in their nature, i.e. films, videos, audio and photography. Kogt i Roen’s digital product (the music and acts) may perhaps be said to be almost a biproduct of the band getting together for a lot of fun. The “real product” is the gig. The music files are also used on the band’s website to “sell” the gigs. As both a biproduct and something used to promote the band, the band apparently can afford to give the music away for free. Or perhaps more simply, because it doesn’t cost the band anything extra to put up the songs anyway.
It’s difficult to estimate the global appeal of something as “local” as Kogt i Roen. However, there are Danes everywhere in the world, and the band’s humour may find appeal anywhere, especially if the word is spread by likeminded, exiled Danes from northern Jutland via networks of interlinked personal websites, forum posts and social networks such as MySpace or Facebook. The website is in Danish only, however, as well as most of the band’s lyrics and acts, which supposedly limits it’s audience to Danes and Danish-speaking almost exclusively, although some songs such as the English-worded, Iraq War-critical Mr. George Bush may find broader appeal.
What’s more important however, is that there’s a lot of likeminded bands globally. A lot of people simply play and enjoy music (and standup) as their hobby. It just so happens, that the internet makes it very easy to make your music publicly available while you’re at it. While the band do not necessarily need to make a million on their music (those days of the “hit economy” seems counted anyway), their product (and many, many other products, which are similar to it in “localness”) may help contribute value to other products, so much so, that it may turn in some extra income. Even though Mikkel understates any need for this, even an amateur band has costs to pay, including the website and gear for the band, so a little extra may not be what drives the band, but may come in handy, while they’re at it.
To create a surplus of value, which goes beyond the “cost per song” economy of the industrial model, the trick is to reach the creative audience who need to tap into this wealth of material. And then to give them access and allow them to rip, mix and burn what they like. In some cases this creative audience are hobby producers such as Kogt i Roen themselves, but it could also be more professionally oriented producers, who are able to ask a higher price for their product, and therefore to pay a higher price for their “material” in return. We’ll have to see if this analysis holds up, when we put it further to the test.
Kogt i Roen is not an ideal first customer for Kaplak. The band doesn’t feel the “pain” too hard – there’s no imminent need for greater visibility or financing. However, the band is a shining example of the creativity being unfolded all over the internet, simply because it can be made accessible very cheaply. They, however, and the many, many other hobby producers of the web could be slightly better off, if they were able to tap into the surplus of value they create by giving away their music for free.
Kaplak need not motivate a hobby producer customer like this band so much (it won’t work anyway, as they don’t do it for money or fame) but rather simply demonstrate, that it is possible to earn a little extra just as easily, as it is to make their product publicly accessible.
