Productization is the process of transferring your time and effort into an asset that can be sold repeatedly.
Record a song, stream it 10m times.
Write a book, print it 1m times.
Build a digital product, distribute it 100m times.
Build once, sell twice.
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All good in theory, but how is it done in practice?
I think about it in four steps:
- Skill building
- Result generation
- Specialization
- Productization
These are not dogmatic rules, just me sharing some experience in hindsight that may spark a thought for you.
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First we have to get good at something.
For me, 10 years of iteration as a designer was the foundation for the products I'm building today.
Much of the work pictured below (+ thousands more) were entirely permissionless, just something I did to scratch a creative itch.
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Second, we figure how to generate a specific result using the thing we're good at.
For me, it was applying my design skills to solve communication problems for brands as an employee of a few different design & advertising agencies over the course of 10 years.
5/
This is all well and good, but does not scale beyond the hours you have to spend each day.
If you love doing it, don't stop.
I didn't, so here's what I did next:
6/
I took a subset of the skills I'd built in my corporate career and focused on an area I felt was massively underserved by the market:
Making the intangible tangible.
The value proposition of a complex business, or the words and ideas of great thinkers. aka @visualizevalue
7/
To begin with, this created a much more focused offering and differentiated me from my competitors in the design world, bringing more qualified, higher quality client work.
It also helped me build an audience on the front end.
8/
With the audience growing as a result of following a specific process, the opportunity for product became obvious.
How can I transfer this skillset to others? By building products that teach what I've learned.
transparency threads have been stopped and started many times, because this process has taken many twists and turns
it began as a free mint, open for an hour, a nod to the open edition meta of the time and the internet's most prolific memetic character
provenance wise - it follows checks, a long-form generative art project that comments on verification in the age of the internet, and gives agency to collectors to create immutable, onchain pieces themselves
as you can probably infer from my tweets, the idea of shipping a finished collection in the middle of what we are currently experiencing in image generation does not feel that special or interesting
some feedback we've gotten along the way on recognizability is also well taken
what we're currently exploring is the ability to "drop" on opepen — and give collectors full agency on how they'd like to proceed (lock or unlock canvas)
maintain max optionality on both sides
there have been many iterations that I would love to put in the collection but wouldn't want to make 16k of them, feels dilutive and again not that exciting