What is Business Samurai?
We live in a world where the tech industry is merging with the media and entertainment industries. Business Samurai is a startup entertainment franchise for international business people and their friends. It consists of a free digital manga and newsletter, with plans to expand to gaming and social media.
Think of it as Final Fantasy meets business meets social networking.
Business Samurai has broad and mainstream appeal. Our audience is working-age adults from Gen Z to Baby Boomers, across gender, ethnicity, and nationality. It turns out that being a grown-up doesn't have to be boring - we've even gotten press coverage from Inquirer.net!
Learn more about us
The manga: Business Samurai's manga is for real and aspiring business people. The story is about the attractive, but deeply flawed, international business people trying to out-strategize each other, set across global cities.
Read the whole story so far at Webtoon Video Contest.
The newsletter: With new issues weekly around Monday US time, the newsletter contains the manga, along with international business commentary. The game: We are starting with free text and image mini-games featuring Business Samurai characters and storylines. We plan to eventually launch a full social video game like Fortnite, Animal Crossing, etc. but about business.
The social network: Interlinked with our social game would be a social network that provides services to international business people and their friends to help them efficiently achieve their goals and navigate our new, multipolar world.
….and more! We want to provide anything that helps. Think of Business Samurai as the startup equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife for international businesspeople.
More Information
We are currently adding more information to this page over time. Please subscribe to our newsletter for updates. Below are some samples of what one gets from subscribing to our newsletter.
The manga above displays some key characteristics about Business Samurai:
- 1. Businesspeople above all, character and plot-driven
- 2. Business and economic education organic to the plot
- 3. There is always some kind of conflict, whether it's interpersonalor business-strategy related
Also, this manga lays out Business Samurai's opportunities and growth strategies:
- 1. There is a massive opportunity to create manga, video games, etc. for real and aspiring businesspeople, and that's been proven by Business Samurai's initial readership. It turns out that grown-ups love commercial art.
- 2. Unfortunately, so much the discovery of new media is algorithm-driven, which is why we are growing mainly through the Business Samurai newsletter, where we have control over the distribution and user experience.
- 3. CRAFTSMANSHIP ABOVE ALL. We are growing on the quality of our product, and we are not creating "content" to please some black box algorithm. Currently, we are not spending a single cent on marketing and are leveraging word of mouth.
Business Commentary
In the Business Samurai newsletter, the manga episode is followed by business commentary, which consists of quick bullet points about different industries around the world, along with international politics and economics. We also send updates about our own startup’s progress via the newsletter. Here is one example:
- • Facebook, Instagram, YouTube get deeper into entertainment. (Tech, AI, Hollywood) [1/15/24]
- • Meta (Facebook, Instagram) is going through quite some changes recently, quite a bit of it politics related.
- • I wanted to highlight that the company is also adding AI characters to Facebook. Maybe they'll do the same with Instagram in the future? After all, in both platforms, influencers can already create AI versions of themselves.
- • Why is Meta doing this? Gotta keep that user engagement, IMO. Interacting with AI characters is one way to do this, and it reminds me of the entertainment industry, particularly gaming.
- • Meanwhile, it looks like YouTube creators are turning into cartoons? So their brands could live forever, maybe? Almost AI avatar-like - not too dissimilar to the situation with Meta above, IMO.
[Everything is approaching entertainment.] - • This combination of pop culture entertainment + business commentary is fundamental to Business Samurai as a whole and will manifest in all future products (see "Road Map").
Road Map
Details of game and social network
The game: Players could do things like story-driven business strategy games or even do training for actual jobs. Or just explore the Business Samurai world:
Also, given how tech and entertainment are merging, we want to use the social game to promote other creatives via a newsfeed integrated into the game, per the image above.
Social network: Some potential examples: 1) Build international networks to achieve specific goals, i.e. new job, business expansion, etc. 2) Organize contacts in a way that you are quickly updated on what everyone's doing and potential opportunities for your career and business. Our servers would be based abroad. Here’s a concept pic of what we want to do:
AI in our social network: AI and other tech will be provided by our tech startup, Cross Platform, which also owns Business Samurai. Low-cost AI models are emerging, so we want to tailor AI to use cases specific to international businesspeople and friends. We have some ideas below. Your ideas always welcome!
