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dear readers,
it’s currently 3am, and i definitely should be sleeping. i can’t sleep because there’s so much on my mind. for some reason, my motivation spikes in the middle of the night.
i was mainly thinking about my brand that i’ve been working on for the past couple of months.
it’s been a while since i started this and a lot has changed. to be honest this brand doesn’t have a lot of direction. when i started, this was purposeful. i didn’t want to tie myself down to anything when i didn’t have much of an idea of what i wanted to build.
i just wanted to build a brand around storytelling, community, and film.
the brand started to turn into myself. it’s interesting. when you don’t have a very clear distinction between what’s the brand and what’s personal, they start to merge, and i’m honestly okay with it.
i think in the last blog post, i wanted to center this brand around a short film. well i sorta pivoted. now the goal is to build a brand/company that supports communities and creatives through storytelling and film.
i’ve been really active on the community support side this past semester. i was able to help host a 20+ person creative retreat alongside the midnight club. i also did some small video work for shift and v1 (both creative/founder communities).
i really want to continue on the community building side since it’s mutually beneficial. i am able to meet a bunch of super cool people i can potentially work with (or gain inspiration from) and the community grows due to my exposure, but i find it hard to gain a ton of exposure purely from showcasing communities.
what i think would help build my personal brand as a wannabe freelance filmmaker is to make actual films. this can easily tie into the costoftrying brand since i can have a subsection in the business to produce films for people in the community. but this is were direction needs to be very clear as lines can get pretty blurry.
what do i want to advertise the brand as?
in my eyes, the easiest way to advertise the brand is to promote it as a film production company. i’ve been wanting to make a film production company for the longest time. i can easily market myself and tie it into the costoftrying company.
okay so let’s break it down since there’s a ton of pieces in this puzzle.
there’s my personal brand (pjk1m), the film production company (costoftrying), and the community building brand (also costoftrying).
the thing is, it’s solely me running it. i want to figure out the most optimal way to advertise this on social media, on our website, etc. i want to figure out the most optimal way to run this as a successful business model.
my goals:
okay cool, i’m going to feed this into claude to rationalize, i hope it doesn’t spit out garbage. for more claude context: i’m inspired by creator camp.
okay claude definitely helped clear up things — i embedded the output right here (expand it if you want). i still need to harshly review and create a proper business model, but that’ll be a task for another time (hopefully not at 3am).
one sentence: costoftrying is a film production studio that comes from the community — built by one filmmaker who believes storytelling and genuine connection are the same thing.
what this is: a community-embedded film production studio. storytelling is the through-line.
the three layers:
the flywheel:
revenue:
the three goals:
how to frame it (depending on context):
i have all summer (no internship just summer classes + part time job) to find direction and flesh out my business plan before school starts again. i have a lot of work ahead of me, but i’m still very passionate and inspired by this project. it feels good to see something live on. (most of my projects end up failing after a couple weeks)
thanks for reading my 3am brain dump. let’s redirect in a week (post finals) and set up some weekly deliverables.