The Game Plan

Remember the Department of Financial Institutions from Episode 1? The longest site visit we ever got?

They didn't write back. They sent a subpoena — via USPS first-class mail, FedEx standard overnight, and encrypted email, all on the same day. The State of Washington wanted to make sure I received it. The cover letter noted that civil, administrative, and criminal penalties may apply. My first reaction was that it wasn't real. Then the email arrived. Then the FedEx package showed up at the door.

Several rounds of correspondence followed. I explained, under penalty of perjury, that Archway had not made, brokered, or arranged any loans of any kind. This was true. The Department concluded that the "equity partnership" constituted a loan under the Consumer Loan Act regardless, and requested that I cease offering it and sign an Assurance of Compliance.

We signed it. The product was already gone. The complaint was closed a few weeks later. If anyone from Tumwater is reading this: that was true the last time you visited too. You and the real estate agents who keep emailing are the only inbound the old site ever generated.

Womp womp

We sent Nick a two-week check-in on his Nashville campaign. The impressions are ahead of target. Creative rotation is working. Dashboard updates itself. Everything we built is doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

Nick wrote back with the numbers. Nashville downloads Feb 25 through Mar 10: 374. Nashville downloads Mar 11 through Mar 24: 187. Then, in his exact words: "womp womp."

I told him the truth: I would have been a little shocked if we'd seen anything move this early, but it would have been nice. The real test is whether repetition changes anything over two or three months — the first month is getting presence established, and it's really the second and third where it starts to show up in the numbers. That said, it's his money. I wanted to check in on whether the timeline still made sense to him.

He hasn't replied to that one yet.

This is the part that doesn't make it into most pitch decks. You build the infrastructure. You automate the pipeline. You deliver the impressions. And then you wait to find out if the product works the way you think it does.

Building through it

So that's the mood. Your first customer's numbers haven't followed the impressions and you haven't heard back.

And then you go build a new product anyway. Because the sports vertical from last week wasn't going to wait for permission.

Four journey templates, each mapping a real path through a fan's day. The morning commute past the stadium corridor. The route to the arena on game night. Bars and restaurants for the watch party. The weekend spots: gyms, gas stations, the errands. Atlanta was the test case. Four journeys, hundreds of screens. Every one in a place a Braves fan actually goes.

We wrote a script that traces real driving routes to 122 stadiums and clusters bars and fan spots for the other journeys. 769 zones across 39 metros in a single run. Chicago alone has five stadiums, so each sport gets its own path. The clustering algorithm decided Athens, Georgia, was part of Atlanta. Thirty miles from downtown. We added a maximum radius and the satellite cities went away.

Naming things

The product naming went through its own journey. We'd been calling everything by the venue strategy: Presence for going deep in one metro, Tour for going wide across a schedule. Adding sports meant a third shape. We landed on Metro Sport, Metro Presence, Metro Tour. Three products, three ways a podcaster might want to show up in the physical world.

We're fairly confident in the names. We were fairly confident last time too.

We also briefly designed three pricing tiers for sports. Beautiful spreadsheet. Killed it the same day. We've done this exact thing before, in Episode 1. Wrote an 800-line spec for three packages, killed it the next morning. At least this time we only wasted an afternoon. One product, one price.

What's next

We've got outreach sitting in a few inboxes. The sports network. A media company that's already doing billboards for other reasons. No responses yet, as far as I know. I say "as far as I know" because I have since discovered that the head of national sales at the sports network replied the next day. I missed it for two weeks. He'd booked time on my calendar before I'd noticed he'd written back.

Nick's campaign enters week four. The impressions keep coming. The downloads haven't followed. He hasn't replied to the last email either.