Third Letter to Alex Wagner on Superior Act
* Rachel from Chengdu *Astral Bodies *Mutualized Share Structures
Dear Alex,
I don’t think that this letter will make you cry, but maybe you would still like to hear about Rachel. She is from Chengdu, and she is three years old, and she was smiling very broadly as she paddled around the pool with her water wing. Her smile made me smile, too. Usually, I go swim around 10:55: that’s when the sun hit the water, warms it up to a maximum point. Now that the “winter” here in Thailand is over, I don’t really need for the water to be so warm, so today’s swim was around 4. Rachel’s mother stood at the edge of the water, watching her. The father is in Canada, but the mom can’t get a visa. Visas! I spend a good part of the day working on the various parts of Job’s visa application: much much harder now, of course, than before, that’s obvious: but he is coming back, even if it will take a little bit of time.
There was some other happy news today, too, a major breakthrough in my meditation practice: I jumped into my astral body. I’ve never been able to lucid dream, but this was something like lucid dreaming: a full entrance into an imaginal body. It helped that I didn’t have to do a bowel movement during the meditation – yesterday’s meditation turned into a ferocious showdown between my will and the fecal mess clawing against my innards. I made it through the twenty minutes, but time sure slowed down: click, click. Today, though, for the first meditation at least, my material body was protected enough to let me take leave. In the second meditation, I tried again, but ached in my body held me back. Here’s a link to a document detailing the process.
This is, of course, all a warm-up to a vision of how Superior Vision can start. The vision begins with a useful heuristic you gave me: to calculate fundraising potential, divide a following by four, and then multiply that by 25. That is, one fourth of a following can (by this rule of thumb) contribute around 25 usd. I’ve extrapolated this heuristic to another: 6.5% percent of a following can be counted on to contribute 100 usd. With this logic, someone needs around 8000 followers in order to get 500 that can do a 100 usd super act.
Now, let’s say that the good in question is a half crate of biodynamic wine – 6 bottles for 100 usd. Let’s say that the wholesale price to the supplier is 90 usd, so there’s a margin of $5000 after the trade. Let’s say, now, that we will put 50% of this back into operations, and put 50% towards dividends: that is, giving money to the supplier, the customers, and to the organizer themselves.
I should say, here, that my brother consistently tells me not to do the mutualized share structure: he thinks it complicates matters, invites regulatory problems, and just is deeply problematic. I tell him that it’s in the DNA of the project. He is surely right that this will create some difficulties in terms of regulation and corporate structure, but such difficulties are well worth the differentiation factor for what we’re trying to do this.
Now, if we can organize…say, 20 of these experiments, that is, to find 80 influencers that we like, ask them the question: if you were going to get 500 people to buy something for 100 each, what would it be — let’s say that 50% of these experiments work, that means that we have done 45 experiments, netting us around a total of 100,000 usd: that’s your “amount of money needed to do this full time.”
Of course the problem here is that putting those 40 group buys together will take a significant, not enormous, but significant amount of midwifing and visioning. This is why I still believe we should seek out some sort of investment to cover the initial stage — not just to give us the freedom to actually do the idea, but also (1) to see if we can convince someone else to see what we see, that is, to test how transmittable the enthusiasm is and also (2) to find an advisor/mentor/guide, a Saturn type figure who can give guidance when we experience the inevitable problems.
There’s one part of the model that’s still not fully developed yet: it has to do with share structure, specifically, with the changing numerator connecting purchases on the platform with shares. At time passes, this numerator will grow smaller and smaller – or, to put the point in another way, a dollar spent on the platform on day 3 will give you many more shares than a dollar spent on the platform on day 5,324. How to structure that “numerator decay” — there’s a rough way to do it, which I’m capable of, and then there’s a sophisticated way to do it, which I’m not capable of. However, the rough way should suffice for the beginning phases, before we can bring the real quantitative geniuses on the love train.
You mentioned unblocking and project midwifing as your preferred goals. Mine are visioning and inspirational speaking: I have a very intense vision of myself 10 years in the future, addressing a meeting of the cooperative billionaire system. You are there in that audience, and the speech that I give talks about this time in Bangkok, about these letters. Now I’m going to cry! Actually, I’m still too full to cry. If you were going to invent a fusion cuisine, what would it be? My answer, for this email, is a fusion of senegalese, french and russian: yassa poulet with salad alexandre dip, anyone?
-BB