Bodies · 20cuts
20cuts.
20cuts is a video studio that sells short product videos, and it is the first business that runs on busibody. A customer describes their product at a form on 20cuts.com, the studio produces a set of twenty short videos, four for each of the five sections of a finished video, and the customer picks one video from each section and the studio edits the picks together into the finished video. An agent operates the studio, a human owns it, and everything consequential the studio does either waits for the owner’s approval or leaves a typed event in its log, and usually both.
01Anatomy
The limbs it runs on.
The standard body has eight parts. 20cuts runs on five of them today: the site with its intake form, the database, mail, the approval queue, and the outbound machine, which is the part of the body that finds prospects and writes to them. The remaining parts attach as the work needs them.
20cuts.com takes the orders. A visitor fills in the intake form with their product’s address, their audience, and their goal, and the submission becomes a lead in the database and an event in the log.
The database holds the leads, the jobs, and the event log itself. The tables are views computed from the events, so the state of the business can be rebuilt from the log alone.
The studio sends and receives email at its own domain. A new lead is mailed a confirmation link, and cold outbound runs on a separate domain, so a deliverability problem cannot touch the primary one.
Nothing is sent in the owner’s name without the owner approving the exact text. An outbound message parks in the queue, and the send happens only after a human answers.
The studio researches prospects, produces a personalized teaser from each prospect’s own public material, and stages the send for approval. Every teaser carries a unique signed token, so opens, views, and watch percentages attach to the exact recipient.
02The ledger
The events it records.
Everything above leaves a typed event in an append-only log, and the schema of those events is the schema documented on the event schema page: the reference there is copied from the code 20cuts runs.
A visitor submitted the intake form.
The lead clicked the confirmation link.
A board of candidate cuts was produced, with its size, cost, and wall-clock time.
The lead watched one candidate, with the percentage watched.
The lead picked a cut.
A payment arrived, with the tier and the amount.
A draft outbound message was staged for approval.
The owner approved the exact text. The actor on this event is always human.
The approved message went out.
The recipient viewed the teaser, attributed by its token.
The recipient replied, with the sentiment recorded.
03Mechanism
One order, walked through.
A founder submits the intake form on 20cuts.com: the product’s address, who the video is for, and what it should achieve. The submission is recorded as site.lead.captured, and the studio mails the founder a confirmation link. When the founder clicks the link, site.lead.confirmed is recorded, and the studio generates the board: twenty candidate cuts of the same product, recorded as board.generated with the size, the cost, and the wall-clock time of the batch.
The founder watches the board, and each play is recorded as candidate.watched with how much of the candidate they watched. When they pick a cut, candidate.picked is recorded, and when a payment lands, order.paid records the tier and the amount. A candidate the founder never watched is information too, because the log shows the exact stage where each person stopped.
While this happens, the outbound machine produces teasers for prospects the studio found on its own, and every one of those messages stops at the approval queue. outbound.send.queued is recorded when a draft is staged, and the send happens only after the owner approves the exact text, which is recorded as outbound.send.approved with human as the actor.
04Live
Where to see it.
20cuts is live at 20cuts.com. The platform described in these pages is extracted from bodies that already run, and 20cuts is the body it is being extracted from.