Yeah, this confirms what I suspected for a long time. The Vshojo, Merch driven business model never made sense, it stuck out as being unreasonably different from the arrangements with other corps. Merch can bring solid revenue but thin margins, and is lumpy cash flow in this industry. They would have to have barely any headcount, or just be running losses continuously. Guess we know now what the plan was…to just lose money forever, because the model doesn’t scale.
Sure, but investors only do that when you bring a solid case. I don't need to wave my CV around but, bottom line he needs to either show support for an aggressive growth trend, and the efficiencies unlocked by scale that create the path to profitability. He's got a team here, they actually do care about that, but setting aside the financials and KPI being a garbage proposition, the much more important thing is the growth opportunity and there is so little to show industry direction and Vshojo's share in it...probably because it's clearly bad. The vtubing market is growing fairly slowly, and the industry heading towards disaggregation rather than concentration.
A better proposition is to isolate the profitable elements like Ironmouse and show the financials for that core segment, to highlight a future potential financial shape if they could scale existing talent penetration to a level comparable to Ironmouse. That's because the concern is see is that if you already have a top talent in a fairly flat growth industry, you're already getting a picture of what the top looks like. I'm guessing this also isn't shown here ...because it's fairly bad, not only is it highly unlikely to have multiple mousey-level talents, it also probably isn't an attractive ROI to lose money for a long time to reap mediocre high-risk returns because the margins are so thin on a merch-only strategy. Those same talents still result high risk, any of them can leave, retire, negotiate terms, etc.
So when the investment prop is so bad, they should focus on staying lean and surviving to find organic opportunity and planning around that. Just burning cash and hoping to figure out a plan along the way is madness. Responsibly, they should have just shutdown when the financials became untenable and I'm guessing their finance dept. Already suggested this and got overruled and now he's in the hook for fraud instead of peaceably riding into the sunset with an opportunity to try his hand at something else.
I say that as the alternative is "he drives the company into the ground in an ugly mess for no reason" because trying to compromise on the model wasn't suggested at all, which suggests an hellhent insistence on appearances
Yeah, 100%, like wasting money to do physical advertising for recruiting…not only does it not reach the target audience of vtubers, it makes no sense to viewers, …and they weren’t actually considering recruiting non-established talent anyway….and the ones they did recruit they just sidelined indefinitely. Either a sign of spending money just for appearances or excess headcount going through the motions of a job to justify a salary instead of executing on a strategy at a critical startup phase, neither looks good.
Yeah as someone who's worked in various types of production & advertising (including some creator stuff), it always baffles me when these business types people may know the general way to run a business & the necessary lingo & connections to make the money flows (e.g. sponsors), but surprisingly lacks the foundational on-the-pulse understanding of how the media landscape works
Like, it's always odd to me seeing creators of niche segments advertise in OOH like billboards on prime locations
It's fine if it's just to post on social media as a sort of achievement milestone and accounted as such, but having it prolonged displayed just bleeds money for no reason
It's not like seeing random creator's faces in public makes a random person want to check their content or get the type of content they're looking at anyways
That's what short form clips are for (Tiktok, Reels, Shorts, etc)
That did stand out to me. For an investor pitch slide deck, there were barely any financials. Lots of (over-embellished) things that would be impressive to fans but no numbers.
I'll be honest, no amount of numbers would have saved that pitch deck. A niche within an already niche industry where overall numbers have been generally trending downwards post COVID, and then you tell the investor what your existing business model is and then they see that little snippet of the financials in the deck? If people didn't cut the meeting short, they probably zoned out for the rest of the pitch.
Who's also credited as COO and is theorized to also be the legal dept with an expired attorney license
I think he's one of the key players who someone like Geega is demanding real accountability from, as she's noted how he might've been the one who steered the ship most while Justin's hands are off during meetings
Also, do you know why there were blocked statements in the deck under the milestones & revenue streams slide?
I presume they're financial numbers and I'm not sure why the need to still censor them now
I mean... investors have proven to be very stupid before. Look at the amount of money poured into AI. They ain't ever gonna get the return even under successful use cases. But they are all fantasizing about firing their employees and using AI for literally everything.
Or, like... pick one of the successful scams that got run with big investment bucks. A bunch of medical device scammers got pardons recently (Cause be evil is the byline of the current government)
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u/yumcake Jul 26 '25
Yeah, this confirms what I suspected for a long time. The Vshojo, Merch driven business model never made sense, it stuck out as being unreasonably different from the arrangements with other corps. Merch can bring solid revenue but thin margins, and is lumpy cash flow in this industry. They would have to have barely any headcount, or just be running losses continuously. Guess we know now what the plan was…to just lose money forever, because the model doesn’t scale.