Week 4 Set: The unit economics worksheet

Fourth set — costing out two slop archetypes on the same terms, to find out which one is actually the better bet and why

15 March 2027

Before the session#

No prep beyond the screening — bring a calculator or a spreadsheet, whichever you think faster in.

In the session#

Round one — pick two archetypes (10 min). Choose two different content types from the specimen shelf: something short and cheap (a fifteen-second vertical “fact” short) and something longer and more produced (a three-minute fake product demo). You’re going to cost both out on the same terms.

Round two — build the worksheet (30 min). For each archetype, work out: generation cost per finished video (render time or API calls, at whatever rate the screening’s numbers suggest, times how many attempts it takes to get one worth posting), a plausible ad revenue rate per thousand views for that content’s platform and category, and from those two figures a break-even view count — how many views one video needs before it’s paid for itself. Show the arithmetic, not just the answer; a worksheet that skips from assumptions to a headline number is exactly the kind of unverifiable claim the screening warns against.

Round three — compare and defend (15 min). Trade worksheets with another pair. Their job is to find the one assumption in your numbers that, if wrong by half, changes which archetype looks like the better bet. Yours is to say whether you’d stand by the assumption anyway, and why.

Afterwards#

Keep the worksheet. It’s a smaller, faster version of the cost argument week 9’s Slop Pipeline submission asks for at full scale — today’s exercise is where the muscle for “show the arithmetic” gets built, before the mark is riding on it.