How to combine competence, curiosity, and character to create a category of one.
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1/ Competence
If we want anyone to spend their time, attention or money on anything of ours, we must first be competent.
Lots of people are competent, so there's lots of competition here.
Let's say this is "school teachers"
2/ Competence + Curiosity
If we add curiosity to the mix, competition starts to thin.
This separates the generalist practitioners from the irrationally passionate.
Let's say this is "school teachers who are curious about learning innovation"
3/ Competence + Curiosity + Character
Now combinatorics put us in category of one territory.
Let's say this is "school teachers who are curious about learning innovation, building a gamified school inspired by SpaceX's Ad Astra." (real example: @anafabrega11)
4/ Making it Tangible
All this is great until it comes to communicating it to the rest of the world.
Which is why bad packaging kills amazing ideas.
Writing, design, marketing — our job here is to lose as little as possible in translation from the intangible to the tangible.
5/ Basic Economics
We can use a very simple idea here, the "content" that makes contact with the market falls somewhere on this spectrum:
Commodity (could've been made by anyone)
Luxury (could only have been made by you)
6/ Supply & Demand
If we follow the logic from there, the demand for generic content is weak.
With "luxury" content, you control the market and you increase demand to the extent you can combine your competence, curiosity and character & communicate them without packet loss.
7/ Where to start?
This process takes a while, and these insights are often compiled in hindsight.
Here's a short thread that can help you get situated:
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