Thread by @visakanv

one of the radicalizing things about making things to sell in the marketplace – including, say, uploading test footage of your guitar playing to youtube – is discovering that the world is much more diverse than you think

I'd say there's such a thing as "marketplace intelligence" or "marketplace sensitivity" and it's something I value highly in people. it's also very learnable

lots of people can go through their entire lives with a very minimal amount of experience in this sphere

there's a chaos surfing element to it

on a long enough timescale, you will encounter...

people who think more highly of you than you think of yourself

people who think more poorly of you than you think of yourself

both of these interactions can be useful, or bad

for example, some people think it's a scam that I charge anybody any money at all for consulting. "what, you're just talking to people"

others are shocked that I don't charge $1,000/hr

the marketplace is big and varied and, arguably, kind of incomprehensible

I would say I learned more about people from an evening of selling t-shirts in a flea market than from a year's worth of conventional schooling. there's all sorts of nuances you learn to be sensitive to. and actually I'd say conventional schooling *discourages* that sensitivity

when I first started selling my ebooks, I priced them at $7.99, because that's the price Dril sells his ebooks at

someone pointed out to me, "you know, you can add a + at the end, then if people want to pay you more, they can"

I thought... why would people want to pay more?

It turns out that sometimes people *do* want to pay more. Several people have chosen to pay $25 for a $7.99 ebook. Why? Maybe because they can, and because they want to. That guy who made that suggestion made me hundreds of dollars via one tweet

Sometimes people just wanna express themselves maybe 😂 I can’t pretend to understand it. But I can make room for people to do it if it pleases them

oh – the thing that surprised me that got me writing this thread was someone asking me about my guitar tone on youtube

*I* wouldn't ask me for guitar advice, I think of myself as a noob: sloppy sounding, full of mistakes, bad timing, bad phrasing, etc

I think that might be the core insight that captures all of this:

whatever you think of yourself, you can find someone in the market who thinks differently

so if you want to think better or worse of yourself, you can seek out people who do, and associate with them

also, I think a big part of "marketplace intelligence" is learning not to preemptively blurt out what you think of yourself.

never downplay your work

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1158720988567109632

I do simultaneously think it's important to try to assess things as accurately and correctly as possible, even as you learn how subjective things can be

there are too many layers to this for me to get it all perfectly right in this twitter thread, but i'll probably re-attempt this thread 3-4 more times and one of them will make it much clearer than I'm currently conveying

^ being honest, not downplaying

I do also think that it's tacky to play up something past the point of reasonable assessment, but again there is A Lot To Get Into Here, probably an entire essay's worth