How's the GC business going?

thundercock.

Space Monkey
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Usually at the end of the year, @Chase writes up a yearly review with a list of best articles and a few comments on how the business is going, which products we can expect for the next year, etc. Seems he skipped this year.
The last few years haven't been good for the business.
Are things finally turning around?
When will the new theme come out?
Anything exciting in store for this year?
And how do you buy the Charisma (& some other that I can't remember) courses? Can't find them in the store.
 

thundercock.

Space Monkey
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Yup.

Some thoughts on the article:
Year in Review: 2022’s Content
What were our best pieces of 2022?
There are a few that I really liked but didn't make the list.
Consider adding them.

Should Men Have Open Relationships is a real gem of an article.
You see this stuff discussed elsewhere, mostly by partisans for
and against, but noone gives a fair even-handed account of
what's the male-female dynamics of it and when it could and
couldn't work, and for whom. A really interesting read.

Logistics Checklist: What to Prepare for Good Seductions
I found quite useful for planning my outings. Great practical info.

When you're starting out, what not to do can be just as important
as knowing what you should do. Along those lines, I really liked
12 Mistakes that SCREW UP Conversations & Flirtations and
Negative Social Proof: 9 Anti-Social Signals NOT to Send.

I'm not getting into LTRs yet, but the following two I still found interesting:
Tactics Tuesdays: Implicit Relationship Expectations and
How to Stop a Woman from Doing Forbidden Things.
The latter is a follow-up to 10 Things to Forbid Your Committed GF or Wife from Doing
that's already on the list, so it would makes sense if you added it too,
although I see it's already linked under READ NEXT.

New Theme: Progress Report
Hmm...
Seems you're treating your employees almost too well, @Chase.
Employees can get spoiled like kids, you know?
Perhaps a lil' spanking would instill some much-needed discipline.

Skilled Seducer Forum Revamp
It looks great!

Upcoming Course: Dating App “Match Getting” Course
Potential Girls Chase Books
Sounds like great content I'll be sure to check out.

The Endgame Discussion
To be frank, I find it crazy how much quality content you've
churned out through the years, yet not have ballooned.
Really makes you wonder...

...

Perhaps the perspective of a reader/outsider that's been following GC on & off for some time might be of help?
(I've only recently come around to applying it.)

Been reading your older year reviews (see especially 2018 review and its sec 2019 Is the Year for Systems, 2020 review and its sec Meta View on Girls Chase in 2020), the 2018 article on the first 10 years of GC, the article from 2013 on the paywall, your forum posts on how and why PUA businesses are closing down (2019) and the state of the PUA niche (2020), etc.
Also, your (Chase) old comments, from 2014:
On lack of topics, thing to understand there is that while I do have plenty of topics - we’ve got maybe 400 of them sitting in a big spreadsheet waiting to be written - some of them no matter what I write it’s going to sound like other things I’ve already written, and others I’m just not motivated to write, which means the article will turn out crummy (one thing you’ve got to be if you want to write a 3,000+ word comprehensive informative article that’s not completely boring is MOTIVATED!). Some of the ones at the top of my list still are the one on how to be funny and the one on men’s hairstyles. These are two guys have been asking about forever that I think I can contribute some good stuff on, but every time I sit down to write one of those it’s, “Ah, I can’t write that now.”

There are plenty of things to write on, but at least for the moment I’ve mostly exhausted the fresh topics I feel like writing about, and I find I keep circling back to ground I’ve covered before. I’ve seen lots of other guys do this in lots of different fields (including this one), and they either don’t recognize it, or refuse to, and continue repeating themselves. I’d rather exit when I’m still fairly good than wait until I’m the show cancelled by the network after people quit watching it because it used to be good but somewhere along the line it jumped the shark (maybe you could say I sensed my shark jump moment coming up, and figured it was time to get out of the water before that happened).
from 2016:
I’ll probably withdraw from writing too much once the new course is finally complete and I can start training new writers better to replace me and transitioning myself back more to business development and then eventually out of the business.

But for now, the business doesn’t work when I’m not a central part of it, and if I’m not actively involved I’ll also lose the ability to get specific, get to details, and teach to beginners, which I need to do to make sure the course I’m building now is as out-of-this-world good as I want to make it.

Once I’m finally done with that, I should be able to say: there, I did what I needed to do in this niche, put together a tool that is as darn useful and helpful and awesome for men as I could possibly construct, and now I can prepare to move on. Until then, I am not done yet, and have to stay on the grind.

I intend to take a long vacation after Girls Chase, but that probably won’t be for another year-and-a-half to two years yet.
from 2021:
actually, I am in a somewhat similar position with Girls Chase again. After performing well throughout 2017, 2018, and part of 2019, the business began to slide into decline. We tried a lot of great ideas last year; every one of them failed; and we posted a pretty substantial losing year. I have ideas to bring the business back, but I'm practical about it; I won't just abandon it, but if it's not going to recover I'll have to start thinking soon about what comes next for me, and what happens with GC if it isn't going to bounce back. I have a lot of things I want to do in life, and nursing an unprofitable business isn't really one of them. So, once again, I have set myself a "$N profit by Y date" goal -- and once again we'll see if I can hit it, and bring about another GC renaissance. Do I still have some of the old magic left, or has my bag of pixie dust run dry? Stay tuned to find out!
from 2021:
And yeah, as for me… I won’t stick around forever (I’ve actually tried to semi-retire twice already — once in 2015 and once in 2018 — both times the site wasn’t ready to run without me at the helm). But when I do move on, it’s not going to be due to disappointment with not having reached enough people — I have, and actually did a lot more than I intended to… I just meant to write my book, put it out there, then disappear from the space back in 2011.

It will only be because it is finally time to move onto my next mission :)
So it's been quite a journey, ey @Chase? And happy birthday!

The Outside View​

In the excellent book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman introduces the idea of an "outside view."
Basically, whenever faced with a project we're involved in, we can look at it in two ways:
  1. by considering its particulars, what's going well and not, how motivated we are, what are our plans, etc. This is the "inside view."
  2. by considering the reference class it broadly belongs to, how well similar projects went, what were their success rates, obstacles, etc. This is the "outside view."
It turns out that the "outside view" is much more accurate.
Why? Because people are prone to a variety of biases:
  • they underestimate costs and completion times,
  • they overestimate their abilities compared to the average,
  • they ignore risks and possible setbacks ("unknown unknowns"),
  • they focus on what's under their control and ignore what's not, even though it's often equally important,
  • project undertakers specifically are an overly optimistic bunch,
  • etc.
So the proper way to find your chances of success is to start from the "outside view"
and then recalibrate up or down based on how good you truly are compared to the
average. See also reference class forecasting and Farnam Street on the topic.
For a longer explanation, check out Chapter 23 in Kahneman's book.
Both Chapters 23 & 24 could be very useful to you @Chase, if you haven't already read the book.
For instance, they might help you avoid the planning fallacy, like with the new theme.

Now the bad news. I take no pleasure in pointing this out and hope I'm wrong. But:
The outside view for GC succeeding, without Chase at the helm & creating most of the content, is grim.

Currently (and correct me if I'm wrong), the GC business works by selling content (dating advice for men).
Most of the revenue comes not from boot camps, group trainings, advising wealthy clients, advertisement,
or anything else, but from selling content, either on a per-a-product basis or through subscriptions.
The quality content that interests paying customers the most follows a Pareto distribution, with Chase
being the top producer, followed by Alek. When in 2015 and 2018 he tried to employ other authors to
create content instead of him, the business started declining. Additionally, the seduction niche has been
declining since 2014, taking a deep dive during the corona pandemic, having now partially recovered (?).

When thinking of businesses from the same reference class (creating & selling content
in a niche, one main author), how many do you think survive when the main author retires?
Thinking of the seduction niche, how many business have survived after the main guy moved on? For how long?
Now coming to the particulars, of those comparable PUA business that survived, what are the differences with GC?
For instance, were they larger or smaller at the peak?
Did their revenue depend more or less on one man? E.g., how much of it was selling content vs boot camps?
How many other people were on board to fill in the gap of the main fella leaving?
Did they change the business model after the main guy left?
And so on.

These are the questions that one needs to answer in order to get an accurate
asesment of the odds of GC succeeding, say 10 years from now.
I can't say for others, but my answers to these questions point towards low odds. 15% maybe?
(By contrast, an "inside view" focusing on all the great products that will be coming out,
the site revamp, various marketing ideas, etc., would give one wildly optimistic success odds.)

As you said, @Chase, the traffic to GC in 2022 stayed about the same as the year before.
But you are still here, writing, hustling.
What will happen when you leave?
In The Endgame Discussion, you touched a bit on this, but didn't really answer.

How does any of this help?
Being accurate and realistic is always a good starting point for planning ahead.
Along those lines, it seems that drastic changes will be needed if the business is to grow without you, Chase.
Attempting for a third time to have others write instead of you isn't likely to work...

(IIRC, @Vision, @WIA, @Skills, and a few others also have businesses
in the seduction niche. Curious what they think of the "outside view"?
What sort of business models succeed here, especially when the main guy leaves?)
 
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Skills

Tribal Elder
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lol i am the wrong guy to ask i lose money, i do it as a hobby... If i want to make money I would probably go red pill or black pill or more online stuff (some of my most popular videos are lookmaxing stuff aka blackpill), but no thanks! 0 interest...
 

Chase

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lol i am the wrong guy to ask i lose money, i do it as a hobby... If i want to make money I would probably go red pill or black pill or more online stuff (some of my most popular videos are lookmaxing stuff aka blackpill), but no thanks! 0 interest...

Likewise. That is the trend, where most of the $$$ is these days, but no interest in that for me...


@thundercock.,

Yeah, it’s a guru business.

I tried to make it not be that. We tried building a “star factory”, where we’d mint new gurus, then the product lines to go along with them. Because no one wants to buy stuff from a guru he isn’t following. If Guru Chase stops posting content, people stop buying Guru Chase’s products. And if the new gurus just post content but don’t have products yet, then people just consume the content and leave without buying anything.

In practice though it is just a lot of work a.) minting new gurus and b.) getting their product lines set up. There are probably guys out there who’d love running a thing like that, but it’s not really my speed.

The other route you can go is with paid traffic, which we had working for a while. With that, you don’t need the guru active. You build the product once, then new people are continually introduced to it and sold on it via ads. That worked great for us in 2018/9, with tons of people buying who were just finding us for the first time and weren’t even familiar with the Girls Chase site, but we ran into issues with it and couldn’t keep it going. Haven’t been able to get it back.

So I’m taking a last crack at both the first half of this year. Get a new product more in line with what the market seemingly wants + redo the way we sell & position products via the new theme & perhaps a few other angles to make the “introduce new gurus + advertise their offers” bit easier.

One of those paths may succeed, they both may succeed, or they both may fail. Depending on how they go, I’ll determine what we’ll do with GC going forward.

If they both succeed, I probably keep GC, bring in someone to helm the day-to-day operations (preferably a guy I have in mind I think would be amazing at it), and probably stay on as a board member / contribute some content sometimes just for fun.

If they both fail, I can’t sell GC (couldn’t get a good enough price for it), but I can’t keep plowing time into it, so I strip the costs down to the absolute bare minimum required to run, remove myself from the content side of things, and probably have Hector + Alek + a skeleton crew to keep the lights on.

If one succeeds but the other fails, I might look for an acquirer, or I might do the “both succeed” plan, depending on how well things are working. If it’s organic that’s working and not paid, me selling it would be contingent on me getting the “star factory” really humming properly, but if I can do that then it should still fare well under the right acquirer even if the old gurus depart — we can get new guys in, train them on how to create content guys want, get their products spun up quickly, and then we’ve got fresh guys giving fresh insights who are younger and hungry to make money with the biz, and meanwhile there’s a steady stream of original, great content going up.

Honestly at this point we have most of the stuff we’d need to complete the star factory fairly easily I think… but I’m just a bit tired, we’ve had a lot of ups and downs, and I don’t have the drive to finish that up unless I see some encouraging sign. So if we get some nice success, I’ll strap up and get that done, because there’s some light at the end of the tunnel.

Otherwise though, I’ve got a life plan, milestones to hit, things to do, ambitions to satisfy, and it’s getting close to the point where I need to get on with the rest of what I’ve got to do before my time runs out. Each us only gets these few short decades, and then we’re back to dust again…

So it's been quite a journey, ey @Chase? And happy birthday!

Cheers! And that it has.

Chase
 

HoofHearted

Tool-Bearing Hominid
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Otherwise though, I’ve got a life plan, milestones to hit, things to do, ambitions to satisfy, and it’s getting close to the point where I need to get on with the rest of what I’ve got to do before my time runs out. Each us only gets these few short decades, and then we’re back to dust again…

Write (another?) book.

You've got a lot to offer other people who are also on a journey.
 

Warped Mindless

Tribal Elder
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@Chase TikTok. I hate tiktok and most social media but short videos are amazing marketing tools when done right and Tiktok and IG are boosting the hell out of short videos right now.

My advice? Hire some hot bikini clad women to make short “daring advice” videos and have each video pitch a lead magnet at the end. That gets them in your ecosystem when you can then work on upselling them and/or making them subscribers.

a podcast would help too. So many people listen to podcast now a days.

Release and updated version of your book on amazon that also uses the lead magnet to get them here.

In addition, if you want to make big money do what I did and skip the little fish for coaching. Hire a small commission only sales team snd has them target middle age recently divorced business executives. They will pay thousands to an expert who can show them how to get a “new hot wife/gf” they can show off or even more on how to keep their current wife. They will realize that you are cheaper than a divorce!

Your blog and books set you up as an authority to that niche.

Anyways, just some ideas.
 

Chase

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Thanks for the thoughts & ideas, gents!

@HoofHearted, I’m sure I’ll write more. Probably a relationships book to complement the one I have on seduction. Maybe some more mainstream-oriented books. I have a few outlined I might get around to…

@Train, thanks man! Although there are better guys than me on that topic I would say — certainly more in-tune ones. I’ve actually been totally off news for almost a year at this point. Is that Ukraine war still going on? I have no idea! My keener interest is in the lifecycles of civilizations and societies. Is there a way to prevent civilization decline and collapse? Seems like no. Can you delay it? Why do societies behave like they’re alive, and suffer decline and death? I need more non-Western history for a better grasp of universal societal behaviors.

@Warped Mindless, all creative suggestions there, man.

TikTok's been pretty brutal for us. 10MM+ views on there netting probably a few hundred clicks to our properties. It's like a 0.001% clickthrough rate. I'm not sure if we've made even one sale off TikTok. Actually there was a direct correlation between Hector switching over from long-form YouTube videos to short-form YouTube and TikTok videos in his coaching client sales -- within a month of him making that switch, the big clients all disappeared.

There's probably a way to make TikTok a profitable platform, but I'm not really sure what it is. Seems like it's just really good at getting you a lot of views from people who don't know who you are and are just ADD browsing from one short-form vid to the next.

Did you know we tried the whole "hire a hot girl reading a script written by a professional" thing? We actually hired a couple different girls to try out for it. Gets pretty pricey & requires a lot of coordination: you need the guy writing the script, the girl shooting the video, the video editor, etc. Then you need to build a loyal following for her over time, because none of it happens overnight. Becomes this whole other project to manage.

I'd still like to return to it someday if we have a bunch of disposable cash lying around and I have a project manager I can just task it to and tell him "Make it so!" and I don't even have to think about it or be involved at all (except, perhaps, in recruiting the babes ;) ).

In addition, if you want to make big money do what I did and skip the little fish for coaching. Hire a small commission only sales team snd has them target middle age recently divorced business executives. They will pay thousands to an expert who can show them how to get a “new hot wife/gf” they can show off or even more on how to keep their current wife. They will realize that you are cheaper than a divorce!

Yeah, that's always a good suggestion.

We get wealthy clients from in-house traffic. They mostly all want me though. I like having clients sometimes; it is fun. At the same time, I'm the worst in the world at scheduling, so one call on my plate for the day means my entire day needs to revolve around planning to be on time and available for that call. Very hard to run the business while also being the talent, at least for me.

We did try a cold traffic funnel for coaching a year ago... had a nice page based on what was supposedly working best in the coaching industry at that time... great design, good copy, nice video, with good video ads we thought that led into it... prequalified the leads... book them for a discovery call with our sales rep... would've been nice if it worked... we could position them with some of the other coaches too... only problem was every single guy who went through the funnel from Facebook or YouTube ads lacked the funds for coaching.

There's probably a possibility there to construct a funnel just for moneyed divorcés... create a landing page just for that, ads targeted to it, etc. Then try to sell them on coaching specifically for it. Maybe we'll do that at some point.

Although honestly I have had us try so many different things at this point I am a bit burned out on trying new things in dating advice.

I have other things outside seduction / dating / coaching / etc. I would like to do that excite me more.

Still have a few more things we are trying with GC that are fun and cool too. So we will try those and see how those do.

Chase
 

Regal Tiger

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I have other things outside seduction / dating / coaching / etc. I would like to do that excite me more.

Still have a few more things we are trying with GC that are fun and cool too. So we will try those and see how those do.

Chase
I think I speak for a whole lotta people here when I ask this: what kind of projects?

I dunno if it's a personality typing thing, or just a similarity in approaching the world or what. But I just enjoy how you break things down in general, it resonates with me. I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way


Currently I'm still feeling a bit of burnout from women and have focused on trying to overwork myself to build enough funds to leave the country. But I'd probably be interested in whatever else you're working on, so long as the general theme is interesting to me. I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way

Always up to you if you want to share or not, but I think you have a pretty loyal following
 

reeax

Space Monkey
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@Chase Have you ever thought about changing the pricing model for girlschase.com? If it were my site, I would implement a system where users buy credits for reading articles, instead of a subscription. Maybe 2 credits for your new articles, and 1 credit for old articles and articles not written by you. 1 credit could be 1 USD for example. When people sign up (with the credit card so they can't open multiple accounts), they get maybe 10 initial credits to check out your content for free, and that's it.

I think your current fixed-price subscription model - which is not based on actual consumption and allows readers to access your most recent content for free - is flawed from a business perspective.
 

housecards

Space Monkey
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ChaseGPT? Cutting-edge AI teaches you how to get laid? In-field coaching from the best minds of seduction at your finger tip? Train a language model with enough relevant text data then it may rattle off something seemingly similar and authoritative.

Jokes and imagination aside, I second with @reeax. On top of that, it’s not inconceivable that in the future someone could use content produced by other publishers for free to create their own product in the niche.
 
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