Welcome to Fully Baked, our Sunday newsletter where we validate one of our previous ideas faster than OpenAI cut off Cursor’s access to their models 🤯
In today's edition:
💡 An idea inspired by tales of old
🔬 We validated this idea - here's what we found
🚀 The go-to-market playbook for this product
🤑 What do the unit economics look like?
⚔️ How the competitive landscape looks
❓ Our verdict: is this a go or no-go idea?
Let's goooo 🚀
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📖 Fables Media Brand
Aesop Rocky
👤 Source: We shared this idea back in edition #333, and I still think about this idea a lot.
❌ Problem:
Humans have passed down knowledge through stories since we worked out how to sit around a fire. Then the self-development industry showed up and turned all of it into bullet points, carousels and 40-second podcast clips.
The kicker: the format still works, we just stopped using it. Nick Bostrom wrote a philosophy essay about ageing in 2005. Someone animated it as a fable about a dragon and it pulled 10 million views. Same argument, different wrapper, roughly a thousand times the reach. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
Create a storytelling brand that turns the best ideas from modern thinkers into short fables, written like Aesop and illustrated like a picture book.
One fable a week, published as an illustrated newsletter and a narrated audio version (served as a podcast), each one carrying a single idea from someone like Naval, Huberman or Ferriss.
The stories are combined into physical books and audiobooks over time, opening up a new revenue stream.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Product demo
🩺 Your Health is Your Wealth
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That's where Function Health comes in.
Function Health is a tech unicorn that offers a groundbreaking health membership that gives you access to 160+ lab tests and advanced, FDA-cleared MRI scans, all for a few hundred dollars a year and all designed to detect disease before symptoms appear. Oh, and scans take just 22 minutes.
Because no amount of wealth matters without your health.
🔬 Our Validation Process
📊 Desktop Research
Personal development is a $51bn market heading for $79.8bn by 2033 - enormous, growing, and almost none of it story-shaped. The whole category is coaching, courses and apps.
Calm (the meditation app) has a library with over 500 Sleep Stories narrated by Harry Styles, Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner. Adults will happily be read a bedtime story.
Charlie Mackesy's illustrated fable The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse has reached over seven million readers, held the longest run at number one on the Sunday Times non-fiction chart, and won an Oscar as a short film.
🚀 Acquiring Customers
👥 Early Customers
Early readers and listeners will come from socials. Post each story as an illustrated thread on X and a carousel on Instagram and let the algorithms do their thing.
Don’t be afraid to start some paid advertising to get some early users too. It’s worth the investment to kickstart the growth of the brand.
📈 Scaling Acquisition
Over time, as your newsletter starts to get more subscribers and bigger ad deals, you can reinvest that money and really scale paid growth. This is the key to scaling to millions of readers and listeners.
Keep investing into socials as you scale - the only path to building a big media business is organic + paid together.
🤑 The Economics of This Business
🏷️ Pricing
Free feed (the engine): weekly fable, free newsletter, free audio. This is the marketing, not the business.
Ads: run ads inside the newsletter and audio version of the fables, CPMs (revenue you make per 1,000 reads/listens) should be good for this type of content.
Books and licensing (the real money): a compiled, illustrated volume at $20 a copy is where the money starts to roll in. You’ll already have the audience to sell to - this is a great way to increase subscriber LTV.
🧮 Unit Economics
Target CAC: effectively zero on organic traffic, will be $1 - $2 for a newsletter subscriber/podcast listener on average once paid properly kicks off.
LTV: a few dollars per listener or newsletter reader on ads, roughly $20 per reader on a book.
⚔️ The Competitive Landscape
🏷️ Primary Competitors
Modern Fables (Salman Ansari) - a Substack, a monthly podcast and a book of fables. Literally this idea, but the brand seems to be inactive right now.
Ava's Fables - four years of modern proverbs on Substack. Same shape, same ceiling. Stopped posting in 2021, it appears.
Calm - owns the adult bedtime story habit outright, with celebrity voices and app-store distribution you cannot match. If you pitch this as sleep content, you probably lose.
The Amazon flood - hundreds of generated fable collections with synthetic author photos. They are not competition for quality, but they are competition for shelf space and for trust.
🎯 The Gap
Every existing attempt is words first. Nobody has built a fable brand with a visual signature. Charlie Mackesy did not sell seven million copies because the sentiments were novel - he sold them because you can identify one of his drawings across a room.
✅ Go
The evidence for the format being a winner is super compelling. A 2005 philosophy essay pulled 10 million views once someone mentioned a dragon (super cool video by the way). A book of drawings and one-line wisdom sold seven million copies and won an Oscar. People are not tired of stories, they’re tired of slides.
But you need to be careful here - relying on AI is not the move. This needs to feel artisanal with touches of humanity all over it. Any hint of AI slop and this business simply won’t work.
Start with free media (newsletter and podcast) and over time expand into books and licensing to make the big bucks.
And as a couple of guys running a media brand right now…we think this could be a winner.
👋 That's All Folks
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