One of the fundamental ideas behind building reputation online is consistently generating proof of work.
The beauty of this idea is that most people are already doing it (they're just not sharing it).
Everything you do is valuable to two audiences:
1. Clients will trust that you can do it for them. 2. Customers will trust that you can teach them how to do it.
The concept of selling sawdust is simply sharing the byproduct of your work.
The fidelity of your ideas increases as you share them.
A powerful idea by Marc Andreesen summarizes the value of proving yourself in public.
You don't know what's going to resonate with your audience until you publish.
If you build your audience on top of demonstrable proof, the path to product and service sales is frictionless.
Example:
Person x follows you because they are interested in you sharing how you're building your business.
When you release a product that they can use to get a closer look at the nuance of your strategy, they're already bought in, you just need to collect their credit card details.
Continually proving your ability to generate a result is what builds trust with your audience, and drives sales of your products and services.
In the context of Visualize Value, sawdust is everything from repurposing presentations as front-end marketing assets:
To sharing behind the scenes content of product development:
When you build your audience with transparency, you can sell with transparency.
Like this:
If you found this valuable — Build Once, Sell Twice contains 40x more content, exactly like this.
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