Still spinning from this idea in 's "Making in Public": that when the economics of consumption don't work—e.g. because the product is a public good—a more viable model may exist around the economics of *production*. That is: when might production *be* the product?
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This is a compelling angle for many (especially older) Kickstarter projects: when what you're buying as a backer is not the eventual product, but rather causing the product to be made at all. You're buying its production. The eventual product is like a positive externality.
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Subscription content producers have a similar vibe. Buyers aren't paying to unlock some article's paywall; they're buying into creation of future work. I wonder if this is more compelling if purchases plausibly cause marginal output: "I'll write fulltime when I get X subscribers"
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Nadia observes that sometimes the production "product" being bought is access—feeling closer to the creator, a private community, sneak peeks, behind-the-scenes, etc. My instinct is that this offering can only scale so far, but I'd be curious to learn about counter-examples!
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This has been a compelling angle to think about funding my work. In this frame, my output artifacts are public goods (essays, interfaces)—positive externalities from an ongoing process which is itself the product. My "customers" buy a verb, not a noun.
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Of course, I don't know what it means to make my production process a product. Patreon still has a "charity" vibe that doesn't seem right. I'm increasingly thinking of it more as "crowdfunding an NSF CAREER grant," which captures the causative angle. Still feels like not enough.
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All this has helped me understand why I feel so adverse to promoting my own Patreon: absent a clear, positive-sum proposition as an offering, the default is that it feels like asking for charity, which in turn feels very inappropriate. Save charity $s for needier causes!
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20 yrs ago, a big risk when investing was technical: could the team execute on their roadmap, given resources?
Since AWS, the bigger risk became market: it's easy to build, but will anyone want it?
Reaching customers, understanding behavior, & rapid iteration became paramount.
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Could learn from ’s 2011 “Bringing Open Innovation to Services” sloanreview.mit.edu/wp-content/upl and more recently openinnovation.net/category/devel
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Hallo, you can read it here: : Still spinning from this idea in 's "Making in Public": that when the economics of consumption… threadreaderapp.com/thread/1294696 Share this if you think it's interesting. 🤖
