Find the Audience First. Then Raise.

Why the round before the money is the round that changes everything.

A few years back, Gavin Yap brought me a project. An offbeat coming-of-age horror story. Zany, funny, with time-travel and multiverse threads running through it. At its heart, a story about a group of Malaysian misfit teenagers, their friendship, and a boy and the mother he lost. I was in, ten-toes-down on the ground. Even though I knew it wasn’t a typical mainstream Malaysian horror film. That was part of why I wanted to produce it.

Geng Kubur got made. Opened on 70+ screens. Licensed to Netflix.

Commercially, it didn’t land where I hoped it would.

The two gaps nobody talks about

The first gap is structural. Whether you’re making a film or running a brand campaign, the conventional path is the same. You find one primary source of funding — a grant body, a broadcast studio, a streaming platform, a CMO with budget authority — pitch your finished concept, and hope the answer is yes. One decision. One budget. Build with what you get. There’s no stage in between where you test the idea with real people first, build evidence that an audience exists, and then raise proper money against that proof. You go straight from idea to asking for the full commitment. That’s a big ask, and a risky one, for everyone involved.

The second gap is one that anyone who’s ever been in a creative room will recognise.

Creative work is subjective. It’s supposed to be. That’s not a flaw — it’s what makes the work alive. But when all you have in the room is subjective opinion, the loudest voice tends to win. Decisions get made on instinct, on seniority, on who holds their ground longest. Not because anyone is acting in bad faith. Because there’s nothing real to point to. No actual reactions from actual people to push back against anyone’s assumptions. That’s where things go wrong — not because the creative vision is bad, but because there’s no way to pressure-test it before you’ve committed everything.

Both gaps point to the same missing piece: a stage that comes before the big commitment, where you find out if your idea has an audience — and what that audience actually responds to. This should be part of the eco-system. Built from day one.

What that stage looks like

Before you pitch the full concept to anyone, you test it. You break it into smaller pieces — short clips, character moments, different versions of the same scene, format experiments across different platforms. You put them in front of real people and watch what they actually do. What they stop for. What they share. What they come back to. Which version of your story moves them. Over weeks or months, that becomes something real. Not a pitch built on instinct. Actual proof that an audience exists and that they respond to this specific version of what you’re making.

Then you raise. Against evidence, not hope.

Here’s the part most people get wrong: this stage needs to be funded and treated as part of the development cycle, not left to zero budgets and spare time. The spend should be proportional to the decision it’s informing. For a brand, a small percentage of what a typical nationwide campaign costs is enough to run proper tests. For a production company, spread it across multiple ideas at once. For a solo filmmaker or director, set aside your own resources. Think of it this way: funding the R&D round isn’t an extra cost. It’s the cost of making the right call on the much bigger spend that comes after.

One honest caveat: anyone can run this method. But for best results it needs someone with a strong foundation in both creative and digital strategy — one foot in storytelling, one foot in how platforms and audiences actually behave. Without that, it’s easy to measure the wrong things and draw the wrong conclusions.

What changes when you run it properly

Two things shift that don’t shift any other way.

The first is the funding conversation. When you walk into a room with real audience reactions instead of a pitch deck, you’re not asking anyone to bet on your taste. You’re showing them that people already want this. Investors, platforms, sponsors, brand partners — they all respond differently to evidence than they do to enthusiasm.

The second is what happens inside the creative room itself.

When real audience reactions are on the table, the subjective argument changes. You’re not debating what you think the audience will respond to — you already know what they responded to. That doesn’t take the creative vision out of the director’s or the writer’s hands. It gives the vision something real to push against. The best creative leaders absorb every piece of real information they can get and use it to make sharper decisions. This method gives them that information early, when it’s still cheap to change direction.

It also reveals something early that’s hard to see any other way: whether the people in the room are the right people for the project. Someone who takes real audience reactions and uses them to strengthen the work is someone you want driving it. The method builds that selection in — before the big money is committed.

Why I’m building this

This is the work underneath everything else I do. The Permissionless IP playbook I’m putting together for anyone — filmmaker, brand builder, writer, director, producer — who’s done waiting for someone else to tell them their idea is worth pursuing.

I’m building this same loop at Always Marketing right now — where the offline world becomes the R&D environment and the audience finds you before you’ve spent the big budget. That’s Part 2.

Part 2 goes deeper into the operational side — how to actually set up and run your own R&D programme, what to measure, how to know when you’ve found something worth scaling, and how to build toward a body of work that compounds over time. That’s coming next.

If you don’t want to wait, there’s a faster path.

Permissionless IP — First Cohort

I’m building the playbook I wish existed when I made Geng Kubur. The one that lets you find your audience before you need the money — so when you walk into that room, you’re not pitching a hope. You’re showing proof.

It’s called Permissionless IP. The first cohort gets two things nobody else will. Early access to the full playbook before it’s published anywhere. And personal sessions with me to design and run your own audience R&D — your film, your brand, your show, your story, whatever you’re building.

Filmmaker, director, writer, producer, brand team — if you have an idea that’s unproven enough to be hard to fund and interesting enough to be worth fighting for, this is the room to be in.

I’m capping it at 15 people. Not for scarcity’s sake. That’s the number I can give proper attention to.

Reply with “I’m in.”

One quick step before we talk.

Below is a short form — five questions, takes about three minutes. It asks what you’re working on, what stage you’re at, and what kind of help would actually move things forward for you.

It exists so our sessions aren’t generic. I want to know who’s in the room before we meet, so the playbook gets applied to your work specifically — not someone else’s version of it.

Filling it out doesn’t lock you in. It puts you on the shortlist for the first cohort and gives me enough to come back to you with something actually useful.

[Join the first cohort →] get on the list.