Episode 12
· 30:13
Hello. How are doing? Hope you're well. I am gonna talk about how the Edinburgh Fringe went, but first, something that I've not been able to get off my mind is I took a flight yesterday from Bristol to Edinburgh, and I don't believe that that's a sustainable way of travelling. If we had the same rules that France had, which was basically banning short haul flights, like you can't fly from Lyon to Paris like you used to be able to, then there would be a plethora of decent train services to get me between the two cities.
Ollie Horn:Unfortunately, there isn't certainly not a price that I can afford. So easyJet for the price of £25, shuttled me all the way up to Edinburgh. And often I I'm always glad when there are companies that I use that upsell morons things. So what I mean by that is, whenever I'm checking out and they do things like, do you want us to upsell you travel insurance for £12? Do you want you know, you actually see this now with online retailers that try and sell you your statutory rights back again.
Ollie Horn:So they'll say things like, do you want insurance in case the item doesn't turn up? And it's like, well, the consumer rights act would have done that for you anyway. But you know, add £2 on. Basically, companies are just in the business of upselling, and the I can't imagine there's much margin on a 25 pound flight, but I imagine there is huge margin in all the various services they try and upsell. Including vouchers for onboard food, which is crazy on a fifty minute flight.
Ollie Horn:Anyway, generally speaking, I'm kind of thinking, well, all of these things subsidize the price for someone like me that's that's like got enough time of the day to make sure that I read the small print and don't get tricked with an upsell. But I remember last year, I tweeted about I think it was e dreams that basically every single time you clicked, they tried to sneakily upsell you one of their like premium services. You know, some kind of like e dream e dreams prime pro £80 a year for nothing. And literally every single click was like, do you wanna continue at this price? In fact, one of them was so so sticky.
Ollie Horn:It was like, would you like the flight that you booked at £80? Or would you like the flight you booked at £75? And the £75 button was way bigger and green. But of course, by clicking that button, you're then obliged to, you know, give them your credit card details and give them a dowry for the next thirty years. And anyway, whenever this kind of thing happens, I'm always thinking, all this is doing is subsidising that headline price, the cheapest price which often I'm the one that's getting.
Ollie Horn:But I didn't feel that way yesterday when we got to the gate and we were the first flight of the day, and firstly it's not easyJet gate agents, it's DHL gate agents working on behalf of easyJet. So easyJet, it seems that most of their airports don't even supply their own gate agents. There's a third party that does it on their behalf. And no doubt in the agreement, there are incentivizations for incentives, not incentivizations, incentives for these gay agents to make a bit of extra money. I think it was even a matter of record.
Ollie Horn:I think O'Leary said that Ryanair gay agents get £2 per bag if if they catch a bag of bag. Anyway, you can see where this is going. I saw I presume it was a mother and a son, but the son was like, clearly older teenager, early twenties, Travelling extremely lightly. The mother just had a handbag and a shopping bag, and the son had a tiny wheelie suitcase, which was so light. Like, it clearly had basically nothing in it anyway.
Ollie Horn:And there was this miserable woman who was wearing a raincoat indoors, and there there was something there was also something about the way that she was yielding so much power, but looked so meek. Like she stood with her toes inwards, and had really kind of like closed body language. The only thing that really exerted any kind of authority was that card reader that she had in her right hand. Anyway, she's getting people the whole system's chaos. Right?
Ollie Horn:Because the people at the gate were scanning people's tickets, then sending them to this lady to get their bags checked. And I think if you were kind of smart or industrious enough, you would just walk straight past, you know, like there's once you're scanned, this lady cannot keep track of everyone that's coming through. Anyway, these were clearly just good, well meaning people. You know, they just they seemed like nice people. They seemed like non confrontational, play by the rules, nice people.
Ollie Horn:And the son puts his wheelie case into the smaller of the two baggage holes, and lo and behold, it barely doesn't fit. But it doesn't fit by the smallest whisker. You know, it's like the the wheel, just half of the if half of the wheel, if the wheel was half the size it would fit in kind of thing. And then this lady just totally demeans this guy by going, maybe try it another way. And it's obviously another way it's not gonna work.
Ollie Horn:It's like a circus game. You know when know when you go to a fairground or a circus and they're like, oh no. Try again. Oh no. The ball bounced out the bucket.
Ollie Horn:Maybe better luck next time. You're so nearly there. It's all about the technique. That was her attitude with this poor guy. Just, oh no.
Ollie Horn:He didn't quite make it. Go on. But I'm on your side. If you could only just, you know, remanuver the contents or if only only if the wheels come off. So this poor guy kind of turned it upside down.
Ollie Horn:I was just thinking, this bag fits. Right? Like, what they're trying to do with these luggage sizes, at least it's sensibly what they're trying to do is make sure that the bag fits underneath the seat in front of you. Right? There's two sizes, one which fits in the overhead cabins, one which sits under the seat in front of you.
Ollie Horn:There is no doubt whatsoever that bag would comfortably fit inside the seat in front. It was a matter of you could measure it in millimeters rather than centimeters, how this bag wasn't getting in. And if it was a soft bag, if it's a soft case, you'd just squeeze it a bit and it would definitely get in. Because it was a hard shell case with wheels, no chance. Turn it upside down, the wheels obviously poking out, turn it the other way around, same the same bag in a 180 degree orientation is still not fitting.
Ollie Horn:Anyway, what what I I don't know how I would have handled this if this happened. Like, don't know what I would do in his situation, but I hope I wouldn't do what he did, which was just pay without any kind of fight. He just looked so disappointed. Looked disappointed in himself. He just looked so sad.
Ollie Horn:That's the just like, oh no. He just looked so sad. Like, oh, they've got me. I've I've done something wrong. And the only thing he'd done wrong was have a suitcase that was marginally, fractionally too big for for their size.
Ollie Horn:And I dare say, maybe, you know, you were to actually measure the case using a tape measure, you'd say, yep, that's within margin. But because it's a size, it didn't fit. And, I don't know. His mom went and paid the £45 or whatever it is they were demanding. And it really put me in a bad mood because I was thinking, god, this is it's just so miserable.
Ollie Horn:If there's something that we want from the human experience, it's just a little bit of kind of joy and sense of community and purpose, and and this is just the antithesis of that. It's just some goody two shoes prefect on behalf of a big corporation just policing, and it's just it there is no justification for it whatsoever. These people probably do have discretion and that's where it needs to be used. Because it obviously just totally ruined this poor couple's trip. Right?
Ollie Horn:Because they didn't shout. This is the sad thing. They didn't shout about it. If this person totally kicked off and screamed and shouted and go, you fucking idiot. There's no, you know, that like, if they were really cross with this person and kicked off, I'm really mean, I'd probably side with easyJet.
Ollie Horn:But these people just took it, and I hated that. And part of me was thinking, oh god, I wish I could step in. You know, like, I I paid I have easyJet, whatever it is, the plus or something where you pay a yearly fee and you get unlimited seat selection and the larger cabin bag for your flights. I worked out that I fly enough that that I get value from it. And I was thinking, oh, I wonder if I could just go up and say, oh, only need one of my bags.
Ollie Horn:So, you know, like I really thought, I was just so cross. I was so cross that this bag being slightly too big, cost easyJet nothing. And they do need to have rules. They do need to make sure that people are penalized if they they bring too much on, because there's only so much room in the plane. But this this this really did feel like a disproportionate penalty.
Ollie Horn:And one of the principles of natural justice is proportionality. And I believe in this instance, you just yet fell foul of that. Very cross about that. Anyway, how you doing? Not spoken to you for a while.
Ollie Horn:The last time I posted on this feed, I was having a chat with Carl Legacy about how to make money at the Fringe. So I thought it'd be interesting for me to talk through how it all went for me. And indeed my friends, I've got some thoughts on the future of the Fringe. I had a decent month. Thank you so much, if you're one of the people that came to see me.
Ollie Horn:I started my show with a little bit of a joke, although it's true, but nonetheless it's a joke, which I guess, that's true for every joke. It's I told a joke that was kind of based a bit on the truth. Oh yeah. One of those. I was at the Waverley bar, which is a 50 ish, 55, call it 60 in a push seater, just off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.
Ollie Horn:It's got a bit of history. It's where Billy Connolly got his comedy star. They actually play his CDs in the toilets. That's how keen they are on maintaining that little bit of legacy. And it's a lovely space.
Ollie Horn:Really nice space. A raised stage, maybe slightly too high raised. But the height of the stage is the same height as the chairs. You do feel like you're a little bit too big for the room. But you know, good acoustics, good sight lines, people really feel like there's a sense of occasion, wonderful location within Edinburgh.
Ollie Horn:You know, easy to get to all the other venues from it. Very happy with it and it's booked by my friend Rick, who runs the Scottish Comedy Festival and he'd been kinda selling me that room for a few years. And, yeah, this year I took the plunge. But I started my show by going, if anyone's tracked my progress over the last five years of doing shows, you'll see that I've gone from five years ago, a 100 seater, progressively year by year, I've been playing venues that have 10 fewer seats. You know, if you see me in five years time, it will just be me in the front of a taxi.
Ollie Horn:In six years time, it'll just be me and some bloke in a phone booth. So I'd kind of start the show with that joke. Partly to kind of address the fact that yes, I'm playing a smaller room than usual. Cause I think last year my Girt was 65 seats, year before that I was in an 80 seater. But I deliberately downsized venue this year because venue size is so important.
Ollie Horn:It's so important because you you kind of do have to get it right. Right? Like if you're in a venue that's too small, you do feel a bit stupid for kind of leaving money on the table because most of the costs at the Edinburgh Fringe are not elastic. Right? Most of the costs are fixed costs.
Ollie Horn:You're always gonna pay the same amount of money for your accommodation, registration fee, for staff handing out your flyers, for the person that you paid to your door. Everything is basically fixed. The only thing that's slightly elastic is you will pay a bit more money for a room that has more seats. But that doesn't scale linearly, if that makes sense. You know, a room with twice as many seats often isn't twice as much money.
Ollie Horn:But most costs are fixed. Some festivals do it differently. Think the Brighton Fringe, you pay a slightly higher fee to the festival if you have more seats, which probably does seem like a fair way of doing it. So you never want to be selling out your entire run-in advance. Or maybe you do.
Ollie Horn:I mean, you're in a big enough room, if you're in a 200 seater and you've sold your entire run out in advance, they're kind of good on you. Maybe you should graduate from the fringe. But I'm definitely not at that stage yet. So you definitely don't wanna be but also you don't wanna have a room that's so big that it looks a bit pathetic that that's the room you've gone for. And I've seen shows in a 100 seater where there's been 20 audience, and it is a tough old self.
Ollie Horn:Because the audience are walking into that room thinking, have we made the wrong choice? They're walking into that room thinking, we we should have picked a different show because it's clear that that's what everyone else did. We've clearly been duped. So again, it's a tricky one. You've got to get it right.
Ollie Horn:You can't be too big. You can't be too small. And I think I hit the Goldilocks by choosing a 55 seater. I the weekends was absolutely filling it very comfortably and midweek I was doing maybe thirty thirty five. But here's the interesting part.
Ollie Horn:The vast majority of my audience, the vast majority, I would say at least four and five audience members, perhaps even more, had seen me before. They'd seen me either at a comedy club around the country, very often they'd seen one of my previous Edinburgh shows, less often was they'd seen me at another show, like a compilation show in previous years or that year during the fringe. But I got essentially no new audience. There was basically no one that was coming brand new speculatively, oh, who's this guy? And that's partly expected.
Ollie Horn:I mean, this year I didn't work with a PR. Last year I employed a guy called Julian Hall, who is a PR person, so his job is to, you know, generate media interest and that kind of thing. And I yeah. Whenever I've used him, he's got good contacts and kinda knows how to sell me, and so they'll always be, you know, press before the fringe, that generates a little bit of buzz. And I didn't do any kind of online marketing, you know, I didn't run Instagram ads, Facebook ads.
Ollie Horn:All I did was list the show on the fringe website, tell people about it on my Instagram and my mailing list, although just once, maybe I should have done more of that. And I had someone handing out flyers an hour before the show, so people, you know, around the venue might speculatively take a chance. I would say, I that person handing out flyers was getting £15 per hour to do that. I wouldn't know if I would've got a positive return on investment. I think, you know, at £15 they need to be selling at least two tickets per shift in order to make it worthwhile.
Ollie Horn:There were definitely shifts where they didn't sell two tickets, so who's to say? But also, you know, who's to say that there aren't other benefits from having that person there? I think about the thing that Rory Sutherland says about the door person in posh hotels. You know, if you ask someone from accounts, well why do we need this door person? We can just replace them with an automated door.
Ollie Horn:Rory's argument is, well, they're doing things that aren't just opening the door. Although their job is nominally door person, they're also the eyes and ears for security, they're also the people that remembers regular guests, they're also those, you know, the people that can tip-off the reception desk when someone's got heavy cases. They, you know, provide a deterrent to people acting badly, blah blah blah blah blah. So who's to say that there aren't some other benefits from me having people handing out pictures of my face on the street? Can't say what they are necessarily, but I think even just, you know, people who've already bought tickets knowing that they're in the right place, that's probably helpful.
Ollie Horn:Anyway, vast majority. The vast majority of of my audience were people who'd seen me before. On the one hand, that's great. That's very very validating. It shows that I'm on the right track.
Ollie Horn:What I need in order to make this career sustainable is that, you know, that thousand fans theory. I need a thousand people. If a thousand people every year pay me £10, I've got a business that's turning over a £100,000. Oh, no. That's 10,000 people, isn't it?
Ollie Horn:I'm talking nonsense. Oh, God. I need more than a thousand pounds. Okay. If a thousand people pay me £10, that is £10,000.
Ollie Horn:So what I need is a thousand people pay me a £100 or 10,000 people. Alright. Well, my ambition started to be bigger. Anyway, that's the plan, right? 10,000 people each pay me £10.
Ollie Horn:That's a business with a turnover of £100,000. Let's assume my costs are half of that. Cost of acquisition, cost of venues, cost of my management, advertising, whatever. That's a very very very decent salary. That's that's that's kind of a professional level salary.
Ollie Horn:So, how do I get 10,000 people to watch me? Well, I need to make sure that every single year, I'm not finding a new 10,000 people. That's the point, right? If your cost of acquisition is high because you're to keep finding new people to come and watch you, you've got a challenge. So, I basically need to make sure that people who have seen me in previous years come back and the way that I try and do that is put on a good show and make it memorable and give them a reason to come back.
Ollie Horn:And on a small scale, that's happened. Right? On a small scale, I'm on the right track. 10,000 people, so what's that? Let's say fifty working weeks a year, that means I need to perform to 200 people a week.
Ollie Horn:That's doable, isn't it? You know, that does seem achievable. Can I sell 200 tickets a week? Split that over two shows a week, that's a 100 tickets. Yeah.
Ollie Horn:You could could see why you could see why I've not given up yet. Firstly, I'm so on top of these numbers, but also, yeah, it's I think it's achievable. I think I was explaining this to someone that was just starting a business selling prints. Prints of their artwork. You know, I think the process to get a kind of a professional wage by doing this kind of thing is actually far more achievable than people think.
Ollie Horn:Anyway, where was I? Yeah. So, I've got I can actually tell you the exact numbers of presales. I'll get them out now. But more or less every day, I had on average 30 people in the room.
Ollie Horn:Let me just open up. I so presales, this is sales that were made on the Edinburgh Fringe app or box office. I had Friday 08/01/2011, 08/02/1952, 08/03/2019, 08/07/1938. So basically, August 16, '55, fifteenth, twenty two, twenty first, twenty eight. So basically, my pre sales were pretty buoyant.
Ollie Horn:My pre sales were filling at least two thirds of the space, but then I made a lot of door sales. I also had lots of people buying on the door, meaning that most days it was reasonably full. Each of those people paid £10. My room hire was around £400, I think for the month. And I did 19 shows in total.
Ollie Horn:So that's 400 divided by 19, which means that my room high was like £20 a show. So, on this basis, this was good. I can make a career out of doing this. What I can't do though, and this is where this is where I'm a bit concerned about the fringes, I don't seem to have brought on that much of a new audience just using the Edinburgh fringe infrastructure. And by that I mean, what you hope by participating in a festival is, you benefit from the general halo effect of putting on a thing while people are looking for a thing.
Ollie Horn:Right? You hope that people are speculatively going to be searching through the brochures, searching through the app, even turning up to the venue and going right, what's on? And in previous years, I got a lot of benefit from doing that. In previous years, there was lots of like a lot of my audience came from naturally people didn't have a clue who I was, but they showed up. And I've noticed a trend that it's just that audience, that speculative audience doesn't exist as much.
Ollie Horn:I've got some theories as to why. I think it's partly that you have got to invest a lot more money into coming to the fringe as a punter, so you want to get a bigger return on investment. I think if you're spending the amount that you're spending on travel up, on your hotel, on that kind of thing, you're incentivized to plan ahead and to book lots of things, meaning there's just less time to grab a flyer and go, okay, we'll check that person out speculatively. I think also, the corollary of that is you're slightly more risk averse. I think you are less interested in going, yeah, we saw some bad stuff because you you want to make the most of your time in Edinburgh.
Ollie Horn:So I think, what I'm noticing is newer acts are finding it harder, and I, next year, need to either do the same strategy, which is stay in a small venue, do a smaller work in progress y type show, ready to, you know, to get ready for a new tour. And on this basis, I can make money, you know, can earn during Edinburgh, not least because I also, addition to my solo show, do about four or five other shows a day. But what I need to work out is what's the next, how would I now take this to consistently filling out a 100 seater venue? And if I'm going from a 50 to a 100 seater venue, that's potentially an extra £500 of revenue. Right?
Ollie Horn:It's actually not. By the time all the various commissions and whatnot are taken off, I probably see about £8 of that £10. And obviously, that's not to say that I don't also have to pay out for the door staff, the flyers, the outdoor billboards, you know. Outdoor advertising spend was about £600, door staff £15, no, £20, 15 ish a show, $16.50 ish a think. You know, it all adds up.
Ollie Horn:But I I do wonder if I'm making that step to go into a bigger venue, well then I can probably afford to spend some money on acquisition. The question then is, what's the best use of that? And the answer is probably content. The people that seem to be selling out their runs in advance already have a very good pre existing relationship with their audience. If they haven't seen them live before, they've almost certainly interacted with their content online, and I think that's where I need to be heading.
Ollie Horn:I know this intuitively, you know, I used to have my podcast Japan by River Cruise, and when we put a thing up or sold merch, people would buy it, Not because they necessarily wanted a thing, because they wanted to support you, and I think a lot of people turn up to Edinburgh Fringe shows or people that they just like online. I think once they're in the room, you owe them a good show, but I don't think that's as important when people are already thinking that person's great. So, I think what that means is I need to be putting out content consistently over the course of a year, so when people are making their Edinburgh Fringe plans and schedules, they go, oh, yeah, Ollie. That guy. Let's see if he's got a show on.
Ollie Horn:But then also, once you've got content out there, it's cheaper to advertise to people, because it's cheaper to advertise online using content that already gets some kind of engagement. And this seems to be happening more and more, that you pay a lot of money to use meta, Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising, to find people, if your content isn't something they'd already be interested in. So it looks like the cost per click goes down, if the content that you're serving these people is content they would otherwise have enjoyed. So I think the plan is putting out reels of my stand up, or putting out other content that people might like, and then as I get closer to the fringe, boosting that, paying better, paying Instagram to slightly broaden the reach. I think the other thing that's kind of beyond doubt is I probably ought to start another slightly more public podcast.
Ollie Horn:This podcast I enjoy doing, it's a bit under the radar. It's me being kind of my most honest, I I I don't ever have ambitions for this to get very big. I think this is just a this is just kind of a diary for myself. Partly partly it helps keep me accountable, I think talking problems throughout loud, think it's quite interesting. Plus, enough people listen to it that I I, you know, I I think there's there's some value in it.
Ollie Horn:But, I probably do need a consistent online outlet for people that want to listen to me talk. Japan by River Cruise, the podcast that I did with Bobby Judo for a good few years, definitely was successful. It was successful and it had lots of listeners and the listeners were very engaged and we enjoyed producing it. And what was good about it was both Bobby and I were kind of domain experts on Japan. We both spoke Japanese, we both worked in the Japanese entertainment industry, both were pretty knowledgeable and clued up about Japanese politics history, and so we could attract a really good caliber of guest.
Ollie Horn:That good caliber of guest would often bring on an audience with them, you know, if we interviewed someone high profile, they shared it, that would bring audience to us. So I kind of understand what a good podcast looks like. I understand that you need to be showing up week on week and that's how you build a relationship with your audience. The issue I've got is, there's nothing that I'm really excited about. There's nothing that I'm thinking, yeah, I would love to commit to talking about that week on week or producing an episode.
Ollie Horn:Producing an episode is at least a day's work a week minimum. What is it that I'm actually excited about enough that I could completely commit? Of course, the things that I like include politics. I'm really interested in politics. I listen to lots of politics podcasts.
Ollie Horn:I read about politics. But do I have something that's gonna be a comparable product to, you know, privatized podcasts or something equally as funny? Probably not. I like cooking, I had a cooking podcast for a bit, but that's a world that you really have to kind of throw yourself into, really, I think if you've got to do content about cooking, it needs to be visual, and a video podcast is well beyond my bandwidth at the moment. I like comedy.
Ollie Horn:I think there's probably enough podcast of comedians talking to comedians. And so, I've been very strict with myself that I simply won't start another project. Law as well, you know, I've studied law for a long time, I'm still interested in law. But I've made a commitment to myself that I simply will not create a new project, unless I'm absolutely convinced that it's something that I would It's a world that I'd like to be in for the next, you know, minimum of a year. And then ideally, you know, five, six years, whatever.
Ollie Horn:So that's yeah. That's where I'm at. So other thoughts about the Edinburgh Fringe before I wrap up. The Edinburgh Fringe is turning richer and more middle class. That's the that's the headline.
Ollie Horn:It was already a middle class festival. It was already rich. But my goodness, that's what, you know, and it's also becoming older. Right? The audience is becoming older.
Ollie Horn:Of the headliner shows, which is the the kind of comedy line up show that I that I helped to produce, there was a 01:30 show, a 04:30 show, a 07:30 show, and a 10:30PM show. Historically, the 10:30PM show would have done really good business. This year, it made a loss. The most popular show of the run was the 01:30PM show. You have older people, and you have people doing day trips.
Ollie Horn:So the festival is just moving earlier. It used to be that the big late night shows, the shows like Late and Live, shows like Spank, used to start after midnight and would be late night and chaotic. Now, even a show starting at 11PM seems late for a fringe audience. And generally speaking, people who have money are coming to the festival. They just don't think twice about spending £12 on a burger as visitors.
Ollie Horn:But they are becoming a minority. The festival is still in the main part of festival for people who live in Edinburgh and local to Edinburgh. The people that live local to Edinburgh, they're travelling in on trains, therefore the last show they can see probably starts about 08:30PM. So my strategy for future years at the festival is to look harder at what I can do in those earlier slots, you know. I think I'll keep my show at 06:30PM, but I think I'll continue to look at making my format shows, my panel shows even earlier.
Ollie Horn:And I think probably a little bit less the free festival. I think the free festival is is a really really tricky proposition, because I think people that are making long trips into Edinburgh want to be able to plan in advance, want to be able to buy their tickets, and the free festival doesn't offer them that. So that's the headline thoughts. Maybe I'll do another episode on on on my thoughts on the future of the fringe. But that is Yeah.
Ollie Horn:That's me for now. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening to the end. Love you. Bye.
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