Have you ever heard the saying, "it's going to take twice as long and cost twice as much as you think?"

Well, I screwed up recently and learned that lesson big time.

A few months ago, I dedicated a ton of my team's time and money to an experimental marketing project that will hopefully pay off this week.

This project took at least 10x the amount of time I thought it would. Which brings us to the theme of this newsletter:

The Cost of Creativity

As entrepreneurs, we all have creative ideas for solving problems. You think of something novel, look around to see if your competitors are doing it, and... no one is.

Are you a genius? Or are you about to realize there's a good reason why no one else is doing the thing you're thinking about doing?

Sometimes the only way to know is to do it. No spreadsheet can tell you if a wild marketing idea will land with your audience.

So you pay the cost - in time, in money, in distraction, in opportunity cost - to find out.

I'm writing this the day before I learn whether that cost was worth it. So here's what I built, what it cost me, and what I've already learned doing it.

Check this out:

See this card of Brent Beshore? With the help of AI, a card game designer, a printing company, and a massive amount of my team's time, we designed and printed 121 unique trading cards featuring most of the speakers at Main Street Summit and a few Scalepath friends and members.

Each card is an AI caricature of an entrepreneur in a pop culture theme - movies, TV shows, games, or history. Each theme represents who they are and what their business does. We’re going to Main Street Summit to hand these out to the speakers and potential customers.

Link to the full list of card images below.

The back of each card also has a personalized description explaining who they are and why we chose that theme for them.

A few other examples:

Kevin Henderson (SMB Law Group) - Better Call Saul
Preston Holland (Prestige Aircraft Finance) - Top Gun
Clint Fiore (Dealonomy) - Monopoly Man

121 unique designs… That’s a lot.

Here’s Eric Pacifici’s card:

Here’s why we did this project:

I’ve shown these cards to almost 20 people, and almost all of them loved it. So the baseline criteria of “will people actually like these?” It’s a certainty for me.

Here’s what this project cost:

Printing: $4,000 for 250 decks (12,500 total cards).
Professional Designer: $1,300
Opportunity cost: $20,000 - $30,000
My team’s time: A lot

Opportunity cost stings the most. We were supposed to have this done in 2 weeks. It took 2 months. Every hour myself and my team spent wrestling with AI-generated faces was an hour we weren't booking sales calls, following up with customers, creating content, planning events etc. It became a huge distraction from actually doing stuff that grows the business.

We were under a printing deadline, already had a lot of sunk cost and time, and we decided to keep plowing ahead, the further we plowed, the further we discovered new problems we had to overcome.

If I had known it would take this long, I'm not sure we would have done it.

And that right there is the cost of creativity: When you do something unconventional, you bear the cost of discovering new problems and investing in new answers

So, why did we do it?

Simply put:

A. I thought it would be easier.
B. This fits into some personal life goals of mine - do interesting things that make me an interesting person.
C. I'm trying to figure out customer acquisition for Scalepath.

Let's focus on C...

B2B customer acquisition is really... really... really hard.

We have many B2B service businesses in our peer groups. No one has cracked the code on customer acquisition. It feels like there are 10 different strategies that kinda work, but none are overwhelmingly effective.

If I had to say what works for most people, I’d say they get their business from Long-term customers who make personal referrals when your service naturally comes up in conversation.

That one sentence reveals what customers really want when looking for a vendor: Trust.

Trust isn't easy to build. You do it over a long period of time, with a combination of demonstrating expertise before closing a sale. This is also why B2B professional services people write tons of content online - it's a good way to build trust at scale. Or they sponsor industry conferences to get their name out there.

Still, everything feels saturated. You create content and so do all your competitors. You show up to a conference and there are 3 other people offering the exact same thing.

So how do you cut through the noise and acquire customers?

I started brainstorming with ChatGPT. My first two ideas were raffling off a flamethrower or a robot dog at a conference.

I was looking for ideas that no one was doing, stuff that was a little crazy and stands out.

“Did you see that guy that was raffling off a flamethrower?? Is that even legal?!"

I didn’t really look into it, because eventually GPT suggested a card game, and all the stars aligned in my head:

"Let's use AI to design the faces of popular SMB influencers on playable cards like Magic The Gathering. People will probably hold onto these cards because of how unique they are, marketing stunts like these have their own way of standing out and getting people talking, and we could hand them out to hundreds of people as a one time collectible item. Like baseball cards but for entrepreneurs.”

(Without getting into details - making the cards playable wasn't possible because of the limited card size. We couldn't add "rules" text. So we turned it into a collectible instead.)

So that’s the genesis of the idea, why we decided to do it, and an explanation of how a creative project like this can really get away from you when you do something for the first time.

But here’s the thing, and what I really think you all should take away from reading thus far…

Was this a good business decision?

From a "Rand's Life" perspective, yes. This is interesting, unique, fun. I produced something real and brought creativity to life. It's a story I'll be telling for years.

But from a "growing a business" perspective? It’s unclear.

This is one of those things business books don't really talk about. There's tons of survivorship bias with entrepreneurs who did wild things and it all worked out in the end.

A collectible card series like this is akin to AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky printing cereal boxes of "Obama O's" and "Captain McCain's" at the 2008 DNC conference. They needed capital to stay alive, so they designed, printed, and sold ~$30,000 of cereal. Just enough money to survive another few weeks.

But what if that didn't work for them?

They might look like total idiots.

"What does your company do?"
"You rent out airbeds in other people's apartments?"
"And you have no capital to survive another week?"
"And your answer is to print cereal boxes and sell them at a political conference?"
"Good luck."

That's exactly where I am. Right now, I'm either the guy who did something memorable and smart, or the guy who blew thousands on a vanity project when we should have been making sales calls.

We won’t know the answer until Thursday evening.

We're not in dire straits like AirBnB was, but here's what I'm trying to say… It's pretty easy to look back on smart/creative decisions with rose-colored glasses because the company ended up successful.

But I bet for every 1 AirBnB, there are 9 other people who did similar moves and it didn't work out.

And that's where I'm writing this from. The day before we find out if I'm stupid or smart.

But isn't that funny?

Shouldn't a business decision be smart or stupid based on the decision itself? Not necessarily the results that followed?

Part of me says that is the logical way to think about it. The other side of me knows that results are 100X more important than theory.

But every day, I'm in conversations with business owners doing little experiments in their companies, asking each other: "Hey, I'm about to do this thing. Here's my thought process for why it should work. Is this brilliant or stupid?"

We go back and forth, think it through with other smart people, and decide it’s a great plan. But we really won’t know if we’re stupid or smart until it’s all said and done.

There’s some kind of balance here I have yet to find. You can logically make the right decisions, but it doesn’t matter unless the results prove it.

If this works incredibly well and we get 6-10 new customers, I may keep doing this. We'll start mailing these cards to business owners who don't attend conferences. Our targeting will become razor-sharp, and our marketing will be outstandingly personalized.

Or maybe next time I’ll just raffle off a flame thrower and get 80% of the results for 20% of the effort.

I’ll reference the moral of this story again.

If you’re an entrepreneur deciding to do something new and unconventional, be prepared to pay the Cost of Creativity.

Alright, that's all I've got for you this month.

I'm writing this on November 3rd, the day before Main Street Summit kicks off. The cards are printed, boxed, and sitting in my van. Tomorrow, I'm going to start running around handing them out and find out if this was genius or a $25,000 mistake.

Next month's newsletter will be one of two things:

Option A: "It worked! We landed 8 new customers with collectible cards!"
Option B: "How to throw money in a firepit 101"

Until next month,
Rand

P.S. If you want to see all 121 cards, they're posted here. Some of them are genuinely hilarious. If any of them don’t make sense, consider reading the back of the same card posted here

P.P.S. If you're a business owner trying to figure out customer acquisition and wondering what you can do to cut through the noise, reply to this email. We have 90 members just like you who will enthusiastically share their tactics and secrets.