State of the Union 2024 — Jacob Robinson

Previous entries: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023

As the holidays arrive, it’s time I make return to a yearly tradition. Can you believe we’ve been doing this for 10 years now?!

(Disregard 2017 and 2018 where I skipped the occassion)

At this point, I’m gonna assume you know how things roll. If you’re more curious, check out the previous years content!

Goals in 2023

2023 was a contracting or shaping year. Each year pairs off, with one year being dedicated to focusing on what’s going well and cutting out what’s not, and the next year filled with expansion and experimenting. So, that in mind, it was pretty easy to hit most of our goals:

Release Baby Bird: This was finished entirely, and released for free. Read it here.
Release JBR Courses: This was done, but subsequently cancelled. More on this later.
Apalla Wind-down: This was complete, though all Apalla content is still publicly available. See here.
Streaming: Streaming was approximately consistent for most of the year, becoming fully consistent after I went independent. Woo-hoo!
Additional B&G Content: This sort of happened. While B&G Stories got delayed due to Feelin’ The Rhythm, other content such as character designs and bios were released to get success. As mentioned in a previous post, Boys & Girls surpassed 250k+ impressions on Pinterest!
B&G Part II: As promised, first drafts of Part II chapters have now started launching on the site, so this was a success also!

Successes

Astukario Instagram: Astukario on Instagram has now surpassed 1k followers! It is the primary place that my AI artwork content gets posted, outside of Pinterest and Tumblr. While the marketing budget has certainly helped it to grow, a few posts on here have gone naturally viral, giving it good signs of growth.
Astukari Youtube: While the Astukari Youtube began to tank after the Jerma clips stopped (and the “Great Jerma Fan Exodus” began), we were able to make a full recovery by the end of the year thanks to consistent streaming as well as a few “viral” YT shorts. This is easily the most fun content to make so hoping we can keep this growing into the next year!
Astukari Pinterest: The Pinterest page, which we use as “SEO” for Astukari creative projects as well as for ChiyoDouga, has surpassed 1.5 million views in a year, with around 500k of those views going to JBR-related fiction properties. We have also started to connecting older posts back to ChiyoDouga, in order to both get some more traffic to the new website as well as help crowd-search for some forgotten sources!

Struggles

JBR: Ironically, going into this process I was under the assumption that it would be easy to build a business and hard to build a creative following, thus being my reason to focus on business first and push creative to the sideline. As I turned out, I was quite wrong! While every part of the creative wing of JBR is flourishing, it’s been difficult to find an exact fit for what JBR on its own could be. We’ve experimenting with everything this year, from paid courses for creatives to AI-generated content farm videos, none of which hit the mark. We even tried to speedrun business validation, and while the process could work, its current state just wasn’t getting there. I think passion has a lot to do with it — Astukari and Astukario content comes naturally, while JBR content feels forced. 2024 will be the year of continuing to try and find a good balance here, assuming that the creative side doesn’t become monetized before then.
Astukario TikTok: Algorithms are weird, aren’t they? While we’ve been able to get consistent 5-10 thousand views per short on Youtube, getting a sizable amount of subscribers and engagement in return, Tiktok has been floundering. And that’s with the same videos, thumbnails, titles — everything! However, this may change soon — the past few videos on the Tiktok have seen a rise in views, and while this might be more algorithmic nonsense, it could be the sign of things finally coming together.
Astukari Non-fiction content: Another real misinterpretation by me: assuming serious, knowledge-based content from this blog would perform better than the funny antics of the Youtube channel or the creative work of Boys & Girls and Baby Bird. Nope! In fact, readers of B&G and Baby Bird have tripled in comparison to even the best SEO driven blog post on jacob-robinson.com! It’s a good problem to have, certainly — but I also have a potential fix that will allow both to grow independently of one another.

Surprises

Going Independent: About halfway through the year, I was feeling burnt out by my tech job, and decided to change things up. I had been dreaming of doing JBR full time, but knew it was out of my reach. However, when the time finally came for me to say goodbye, I thought of a crazy idea: what if I just went independent anyway? While not being revenue-positive on my projects, I did have an incredibly large net worth from my (somewhat short) tech career as well as a series of good investment decisions. So, I decided, fuck it — I didn’t take a new job after leaving, and instead have been focusing full steam ahead on my work. And while part of me thought this project was doomed, this are… surprisingly stable? Net worth is approximately the same, and as you can tell most of our projects are growing. So while I intended to do this for only six months, as an experiment… perhaps, here’s to six more?
Feelin’ The Rhythm: FTR was an experimental story idea based on telling a visual novel via shorts on Youtube and Tiktok. It came out to somewhat successful results — however, the big deal was how much we learned from the process. FTR may be ending soon, but its spirit will continue to live on!
Amphala: Alright, this was supposed to be in stealth mode for a lot longer, but thanks for Facebook’s piss-poor privacy settings the cat went out of the bag. House of Amphala, also known as Amphala Girls, is another experimental story from JBR. This time, we’re taking on the new concept of “digital AI influencer” to instead make an ARG-esque story about five girls who live in the fictional town of Amphala in Rocheport County. Things have been a little bit shaky at first with the leak as well as a few technical snags in production, but given how fast the project is growing in followers we figure its worth continuing into the new year!

For 2024

Going on the alternating path, 2024 is an expansion year. Here are the current plans, given everything mentioned already:

Finding fit with JBR: How can JBR be a business, but still feel fun? Can “autonomous business crafting” work? Is there a way to treat business like investing?
Expanding ChiyoDouga: ChiyoDouga is our attempt at an “ethical content mill”, a place to curate great stuff going around the internet while still giving proper attributions and traffic flow to the creators. We’re going to be expanding this in the new year, first by getting an official domain and secondly by expanding into YT, Tiktok, and Instagram (probably by taking over JBR’s old stuff).
Heaven Belongs To You: As I’ve promised, HBTY is the first game from Feels Like Heaven Productions. I’d like to release two games this year, as I really feel like production here has been slow (I have more game ideas than story ideas at this point), but right now this is our focus.
Another free short story: There’s a few new stories in the oven, which I’m hoping one will be released this year in the same vein as Baby Bird, for free on the site.
Short story shorts: FTR was great, but its greatest problem was its length. Are you likely to watch a short on your TL if it says its “Part 44”? Could we make single, short and sweet, one minute long content instead?
Bringing back video to the blog: While the blog’s audio summaries were recently replaced by Monday Morning Coffee, I’m not planning on giving up on audio/video just yet. I have an idea that video content could thrive on shorts as well as standard Youtube videos.
BDC, The Return?: The ghost of State of the Union past has returned once more! We still get a couple of sales here and there from Redbubble, even with the store now back to being a ghost town. Perhaps its a good move to get this started once more?

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