Micro Businesses, WhatsApp Communities & Videos on X
Faiā Newsletter #026 | Review of August 2023
Hello all,
We hope you’ve been well. Faiā’s been going through many changes as of late (who hasn’t), and so we thought we’d shoot out this newsletter based on important trends and insights we’ve been noticing over the last month.
Specifically:
1-2 person “micro” businesses earning $1-$10m per year (including many teenagers)
WhatsApp Communities
Video Creators on X
Hope you find them interesting and useful!
George Siosi Samuels
Managing Director, Faiā
COMPANY UPDATES
First, a few company updates:
We recently partnered up with LIT Collective, a UX/branding agency in Brazil. Feel free to give them a follow or say hi!
We’ve refined our target audience to emerging tech companies with ex-corporate leaders, typically working in fintech/AI/blockchain. We will be aiming at companies (who we like to call “micro empires”) scaling up from $2m in annual turnover, or looking to grow beyond 10 employees. We’ll still continue to work with our enterprise clients with custom needs, but they won’t be our target.
Emerging tech and community-building will still be our staple competencies.
🔬 Insights
When it comes to online community-building, content is king. However, micro-content is really the game. But why? Well, due to the volume of information people are bombarded with every day, it’s getting harder and harder to capture people’s attention.
Therefore, it’s essential to:
Know your audience
Know what they want (intimately)
Know what type of content to serve them and when
We’ve found using an Emotional Resonance Map to be incredibly helpful. An Emotional Resonance Map is a visualization tool used to understand how users or customers emotionally engage with a brand, product, or experience. Like a heat map for emotions, it identifies zones where users might feel specific emotions such as joy, frustration, or indifference.
📊 Trends
So let’s dive into the 3 trends we mentioned earlier:
1 — Teenage Micro Businesses
If you want to know where the future is headed, study the next generation of digital natives. They’re incredibly in tune with their market, and leveraging the Internet to turn their passions into $$$. This is something all older generations can learn from.
2 — WhatsApp Communities
Outside of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk pretending to want to fight, Twitter (now X) and Meta are going head-to-head. We’ll talk about X next, but WhatsApp (a sub-company of Meta) has been rolling out new features, which is really benefiting communities.
We’ve been testing the latest changes out ourselves, and have noticed a significant improvement. Things are becoming easier if you happen to manage multiple communities. You can even use tools like Nas.io to turn your groups into subscriptions, or even get AI-driven summaries of conversations (a huge plus).
If you deal with communities outside of Europe, the US, and Australia, then you may want to start incorporating a WhatsApp Community strategy into your plans. Because the rest of the world is primarily on WhatsApp.
3 — Video Creators on X
Elon is hell-bent on turning X into an “everything app” (in other words, WeChat for the West). And as part of that plan, he’s overhauling the business to serve more creators (which means more ad revenue).
If you heard about the Republican Debate night (Aug 23rd), ex-FOX news anchor, Tucker Carlson, went toe-to-toe with traditional news networks by interviewing Donald J. Trump solo exclusively on X.
What were the results?
Well, just 3 days later, the single episode garnered over 260M+ views! Smashing traditional cable network numbers by miles. Nothing like this has been done before, so it is setting a new precedent and approach for politics.
What does this mean for you?
Micro empires are being built right now, exclusively on X. Despite the platform being around for years, it’s undergoing an overhaul under Musk’s leadership. This means you have the opportunity to take advantage of the changes now.