Here’s my Q1 2021 prediction, with more detailed notes in a spreadsheet here. I started out estimating the size of the market, to get reference points. Based on very rough estimates of CEA subscriptions, # of people Effective Altruism Coaching has worked with, and # of people who have gone through a CFAR workshop, I estimated the number of EAs who are interested enough in productivity to pay for a service to be ~8000. The low number of people who have done Effective Altruism Coaching (I estimated 100, but this is an important assumption that could be wrong since I don’t think Lynette has published this number anywhere) suggests a range for your course (which is more expensive) of ~10 to 45 people in Q1. Some other estimates, which are in the spreadsheet linked above, gave me a range of $8,000 to $42,000. I didn’t have enough time to properly look into 2021 as a whole, so I just did a flat 10% growth rate across all the numbers and got this prediction. Interestingly, I notice a pressure to err on the side of optimistic when publicly evaluating people’s companies/initiatives.
Your detailed notes were very helpful in this. I noticed that I wanted more information on:
The feedback you got from the first course. How many of them would do it again or recommend it to a friend?
More detail on your podcast plans. I didn’t fully understand the $10 lessons – I assumed it was optional $10 lessons attached to each podcast, but this may be wrong.
How much you’re focusing on EA’s. The total market for productivity services is a lot bigger (here’s an estimate of $1B market value for life coaching, which encompasses productivity coaching).
Do these estimates align with what you’re currently thinking? Are there any key assumptions I made that you disagree with? (here are blank distributions for Q1 and 2021 if you want to share what you’re currently projecting).
The estimates seem fair, Honestly, much better than I would expect given the limited info you had, and the assumptions you made (the biggest one that’s off is that I don’t have any plans to only market to EAs).
Since I know our market is much larger, I use a different forecasting methodology internally which looks at potential marketing channels and growth rates.
I didn’t really understand how you were working in growth rate into your calculations in the spreadsheet, maybe just eyeballing what made sense based on the current numbers and the total addressable market?
One other question I have about your platform is that I don’t see any way to get the expected value of the density function, which is honestly the number I care most about. Am I missing something obvious?
Yeah, I mostly focused on the Q1 question so didn’t have time to do a proper growth analysis across 2021 – I just did 10% growth each quarter and summed that for 2021, and it looked reasonable given the EA TAM. This was a bit of a ‘number out of the air,’ and in reality I wouldn’t expect it to be the same growth rate across all quarters. Definitely makes sense that you’re not just focusing on the EA market – the market for general productivity services in the US is quite large! I looked briefly at the subscriptions for top productivity podcasts on Castbox (e.g. Getting Things Done, 5am miracle), which suggests lots of room for growth (although I imagine podcast success is fairly power law distributed).
There isn’t a way to get the expected value, just the median currently (I had a bin in my snapshot indicating a median of $25,000). I’m curious what makes the expected value more useful than the median for you?
Yeah, I mostly focused on the Q1 question so didn’t have time to do a proper growth analysis across 2021
Yeah, I was talking about the Q1 model when I was trying to puzzle out what your growth model was.
There isn’t a way to get the expected value, just the median currently (I had a bin in my snapshot indicating a median of $25,000). I’m curious what makes the expected value more useful than the median for you?
A lot of the value of potential growth vectors of a business come in the tails. For this particular forecast it doesn’t really matter because it’s roughly bell-curved shape, but if I was using this as for instance decisionmaking tool to decide what actions to take, I’d really want to look at which ideas had a small chance of being very runaway successes, and how valuable that makes them compared to other options which are surefire, but don’t have that chance of tail success. Choosing those ideas isn’t likely to pay off on any single idea, but is likely to pay off over the course of a business’s lifetime.
I just eyeballed the worst to best case for each revenue source (and based on general intuitions about e.g. how hard it is to start a podcast). Yeah, this makes a lot of sense – we’ve thought about showing expected value in the past so this is a nice +1 to that.
Here’s my Q1 2021 prediction, with more detailed notes in a spreadsheet here. I started out estimating the size of the market, to get reference points. Based on very rough estimates of CEA subscriptions, # of people Effective Altruism Coaching has worked with, and # of people who have gone through a CFAR workshop, I estimated the number of EAs who are interested enough in productivity to pay for a service to be ~8000. The low number of people who have done Effective Altruism Coaching (I estimated 100, but this is an important assumption that could be wrong since I don’t think Lynette has published this number anywhere) suggests a range for your course (which is more expensive) of ~10 to 45 people in Q1. Some other estimates, which are in the spreadsheet linked above, gave me a range of $8,000 to $42,000. I didn’t have enough time to properly look into 2021 as a whole, so I just did a flat 10% growth rate across all the numbers and got this prediction. Interestingly, I notice a pressure to err on the side of optimistic when publicly evaluating people’s companies/initiatives.
Your detailed notes were very helpful in this. I noticed that I wanted more information on:
The feedback you got from the first course. How many of them would do it again or recommend it to a friend?
More detail on your podcast plans. I didn’t fully understand the $10 lessons – I assumed it was optional $10 lessons attached to each podcast, but this may be wrong.
How much you’re focusing on EA’s. The total market for productivity services is a lot bigger (here’s an estimate of $1B market value for life coaching, which encompasses productivity coaching).
Do these estimates align with what you’re currently thinking? Are there any key assumptions I made that you disagree with? (here are blank distributions for Q1 and 2021 if you want to share what you’re currently projecting).
Thanks, this was great!
The estimates seem fair, Honestly, much better than I would expect given the limited info you had, and the assumptions you made (the biggest one that’s off is that I don’t have any plans to only market to EAs).
Since I know our market is much larger, I use a different forecasting methodology internally which looks at potential marketing channels and growth rates.
I didn’t really understand how you were working in growth rate into your calculations in the spreadsheet, maybe just eyeballing what made sense based on the current numbers and the total addressable market?
One other question I have about your platform is that I don’t see any way to get the expected value of the density function, which is honestly the number I care most about. Am I missing something obvious?
Yeah, I mostly focused on the Q1 question so didn’t have time to do a proper growth analysis across 2021 – I just did 10% growth each quarter and summed that for 2021, and it looked reasonable given the EA TAM. This was a bit of a ‘number out of the air,’ and in reality I wouldn’t expect it to be the same growth rate across all quarters. Definitely makes sense that you’re not just focusing on the EA market – the market for general productivity services in the US is quite large! I looked briefly at the subscriptions for top productivity podcasts on Castbox (e.g. Getting Things Done, 5am miracle), which suggests lots of room for growth (although I imagine podcast success is fairly power law distributed).
There isn’t a way to get the expected value, just the median currently (I had a bin in my snapshot indicating a median of $25,000). I’m curious what makes the expected value more useful than the median for you?
Yeah, I was talking about the Q1 model when I was trying to puzzle out what your growth model was.
A lot of the value of potential growth vectors of a business come in the tails. For this particular forecast it doesn’t really matter because it’s roughly bell-curved shape, but if I was using this as for instance decisionmaking tool to decide what actions to take, I’d really want to look at which ideas had a small chance of being very runaway successes, and how valuable that makes them compared to other options which are surefire, but don’t have that chance of tail success. Choosing those ideas isn’t likely to pay off on any single idea, but is likely to pay off over the course of a business’s lifetime.
I just eyeballed the worst to best case for each revenue source (and based on general intuitions about e.g. how hard it is to start a podcast). Yeah, this makes a lot of sense – we’ve thought about showing expected value in the past so this is a nice +1 to that.