The Outlier Score: I'm Making a Billionaire Micro-Drama With My Products in the Plot

Adrian Vale could tell you what a billion people would watch before they watched it. Brands paid him millions. Creators begged to work for him.

But tonight, the numbers were wrong.

That is how episode one opens. It is a billionaire-CEO micro-drama: betrayal, a buried secret, a cliffhanger every two and a half minutes. I am making it, it is animated with Claude, and two of my own products are written into the story on purpose.

The story so far#

No spoilers past episode one here. The setup:

Aster House is an agency about to lose its flagship client, an account worth $20 million. The CEO, Adrian Vale, gives his executive team seven days to save it. Whoever does runs his new division. Everyone in that room wants it.

Two floors down sits someone nobody invited to the meeting. Rowan Hale, junior analyst. People get his name wrong. While everyone else counts followers, Rowan watches what people actually watch.

He finds a creator with 8,000 followers. Her name is Zoya Rahman. Her last few posts each beat her own normal by five, six, nine times. She is outperforming accounts with millions of followers. People do not just see her. They stay.

Rowan brings it to Adrian and expects a pat on the back. He gets this instead:

Take her off the list. I didn't ask about her numbers. Stay away from Zoya Rahman.

Because eight years ago, Aster House had two founders. One was Adrian Vale. The other was Zoya Rahman. And Adrian has spent eight years making sure nobody remembers her.

Watch the series#

The series is still going. Four episodes are out as I write this, and the playlist has all of them in order:

Open the full playlist on YouTube

Why a micro-drama?#

Because the format is addictive, and I wanted to understand why from the inside.

Billionaire dramas, betrayal plots, secret-identity stories: you have seen them all over your feed. Each episode is a couple of minutes. Each one ends on a hook. They are engineered so that not watching the next one feels like leaving a sentence unfinished.

I spend a lot of time looking at what makes short videos work. At some point reading about a format stops teaching you anything and you have to make one. So this is me making one.

Why my products are in the plot#

Look at how Rowan finds Zoya:

I ran her last few posts through Rank Kiwi. Every one beats her normal by five, six, nine times.

Rank Kiwi is real. I built it. And that scene is not a product demo dropped into a story. It is the story. The whole plot turns on one idea: a creator's follower count tells you less than how far a post beats that creator's own normal. That number is the outlier score, it is what Rank Kiwi shows you, and it is the title of the episode.

Ring Ping, another of my products, is written into the series too.

The thinking is simple. If people follow the story, they meet the products the way you meet a character's car or their phone: as part of the world, not as an interruption. Nobody skips it, because there is nothing to skip. It is soft marketing, and I think it is more honest than it sounds, as long as you say out loud that you are doing it. So: I am doing it. Those are my products.

There is a line I am trying not to cross. The product can be why something happens in the story. It cannot be the hero. The second Rowan turns to the camera and lists features, the audience leaves, and they would be right to.

How it is made#

The animation is made with Claude. The story and the direction are mine. Claude builds the animation, and I keep refining it until it matches what was in my head.

It is the same way of working I described in letting AI edit a whole reel for about ₹50: you bring the direction and the taste, the model does the hands-on production. A series like this would have needed a small studio not long ago. I am one person with a script and a lot of rounds of changes.

What I am testing#

This is an experiment, and I would rather tell you what I am measuring than pretend I know the answer:

• Do people come back for episode two? One viral episode is luck. A returning audience is a format.
• Does the product placement register, or bounce off? If viewers look up Rank Kiwi after watching, the idea works. If they do not notice it at all, it is too subtle. If they complain, it is too loud.
• Can one person keep up a series? Making one good episode is a project. Making the eighth is a system.

I am experimenting with a lot of things right now, and this is one of them. It might become the main way I talk about what I build. It might become a fun thing I did in November. Either way I will know more than I did, and I will write that up too.

Start here#

Episode one is at the top of this page. If it gets you, the playlist has the rest, and new episodes go up on my YouTube channel.

And if you want to see whether one of your own posts is an outlier, Rank Kiwi is right there. Rowan would approve.