Turn Your Knowledge to Dollars, in Minutes

Start a Loom microbusiness with zero risk and zero costs

I. The $1.5 Million Napkin

In New York City in 1998, the leaders of Citigroup—a then-newly founded trillion-dollar multinational banking conglomerate—sat down for coffee with designer Paula Scher.

Citigroup was a merger of two organizations: Citicorp and Traveler's Bank. This new, combined organization required a new brand.

Citigroup hired Paula for $1.5 million to architect a new brand identity that captured the spirit and vision of the venture. (If that number seems big to you, consider this: this logo would appear worldwide on thousands of storefronts, magazines, television, and the internet. Billions of people would see this logo. A million and a half is a perfectly legitimate sum to get this right).

This meeting was a scoping session. "Scoping" means that the point of this session was not about doing the work. This meeting was about defining the work to be done.

But things didn't go as planned.

Halfway through the meeting, Paula started sketching on a napkin. After a few seconds, she had completed this doodle:

She sat back, looked at her work, and knew she'd nailed it.?

"This is your logo," she said. And she was right.

Six months later when the brand was launched, the company revealed its logo to the world:

Was she ripping off Citibank? $1.5 million for something that took her seconds?

Not in the slightest. Here’s what Paula said:

"How can it be that you talk to someone and it’s done in a second? But it IS done in a second—it’s done in a second and 34 years. It’s done in a second and every experience, and every movie, and everything in my life that’s in my head."

Takeaway: Overnight successes are decades in the making.

II. A Guy Named Blake Flips a Tool Called Loom

Twenty years later, Blake Emal was humming along in his own career as a CMO and Head of Content. Like Paula, he had accrued an impressive resume and developed expertise.

Companies he worked for: Riverside.fm, Copy.ai, Talkdesk

Companies he worked with: Samsung, Loom, TripAdvisor, Betterment

Paula’s world is branding and identity. Blake’s world is marketing and content.?

Paula built her career in the business heart of the western hemisphere: New York City. So while it only took her seconds to sketch that Citibank logo, she had made all the necessary moves to position herself as the type of person that Citibank reached out to in the first place.

She paid a heavy price for that $1.5 million. She moved to NYC in 1970, grinding out a career in the dog-eat-dog world of NYC design firms. Living in New York City was a requirement: she was building her career at a time when she needed to be physically present to create the connections that allowed her design firm to thrive.

Blake had the benefit of beginning his career almost fifty years later, which meant he had access to social media—tools that would allow him to build an audience from anywhere.

Blake cultivated an audience of 88,000 on Twitter and 20,000 on LinkedIn from his home in Salt Lake City, UT.

Where things get interesting is when Blake announced that for $50 he would give Twitter account critiques using Loom.?

Pay him $50 and he records a short screenshare video offering suggestions and comments made specifically for you where he reviews your tweets, your banner, and your bio. He peruses your Twitter, fires up Loom, and talks out his observations and analysis. The process takes him five minutes.

(Side note: I'll include an example of one of these teardowns in my upcoming?Loom Mastery?course)

In Paula’s heyday, both Twitter and Loom didn’t exist. She had to brace NYC winters and smelly subways for decades before the Citibank moment.

Blake’s rise is happening right now. He’s using two free software tools—Twitter and Loom—to pull off the same magic that Paula did in far less time and with less effort. And he’s doing it from Salt Lake City!

Takeaway: Today, a little creativity applied to freely available software tools creates possibilities that weren’t available in the past.??

III. You Can Too?

My head exploded when I realized the implications.

I’ve been a fan of Loom for years now. As a feedback tool, nothing comes close. Screenshared feedback over Loom is a gamechanger: it’s richer, more detailed, pausable, speed-adjustable, and commentable.

But I hadn’t considered that I could charge people for giving Looms.

Blake saw the potential to monetize his feedback. As an audience-building expert, he leveraged the convenience and richness of Loom feedback into a microbusiness. $50 for five minutes of effort? Not bad. And without having to move to NYC.

What expertise have you cultivated that you could deliver through Looms??A prototype needing design critique, a legal document needing review, a sales proposal needing edits, a slide deck needing punch ups?

You can charge for it, just like?Blake.

Because Loom has free plans, it costs you nothing to create your own microbusiness. And you can do it from the convenience of your own home.

So I’ll leave you with two questions: What expertise do you have lying around? And what’s stopping you from asking people to pay you for it over Loom?

Install Loom here: https://www.loom.com/

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