What is Business Samurai?
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
Business Samurai's manga is for real and aspiring businesspeople. The story is about the attractive, but deeply flawed, US-educated international businesspeople trying to outstrategize each other set across global cities with business and economic education baked into the plot for a broad and mainstream appeal.
Read about the story at Webtoon Video Contest.
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 of 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
The writeup right above also displays another key characteristic about Business Samurai: business commentary.
In the Business Samurai newsletter, the manga episode is followed by business commentary. 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").
- • Business Samurai is an entertainment intellectual property (IP). This means that while the characters, plot, and story world have debuted in a manga, they can appear in other media.
- • Our plan is to 1 - grow our newsletter following, 2 - test casual mini mobile games based on the Business Samurai IP, 3 - close an investment round with investors, and 4 - launch casual video games based on Business Samurai.
- • One major goal is to create a massive, global social simulation game, like Animal Crossing, but for businesspeople. For example, you could build and launch a business, across a variety of industries, in-game, as a way to market a real-life business. We might even allow some social networking, like a combination of Nintendo and LinkedIn.
What is “global economic literacy?”
I use this term to describe having a solid understanding of concepts like personal finance and, importantly, economics - including concepts like trade. I hope that global economic literacy becomes part of the zeitgeist, to the point where popular engagement with economic issues could encourage experts worldwide to come to a solution to what I feel is one of the major challenges of our time: “What do we do now that there are more people than jobs in this world?”