Productize Yourself.
“Productize” and “yourself.” “Yourself” has uniqueness. “Productize” has leverage. “Yourself” has accountability. “Productize” has specific knowledge. “Yourself” also has specific knowledge in there. So all of these pieces, you combine them into these two words. - Naval Ravikant
Increasingly diverse interests, preferences, and range of nuanced derivations within those preferences; the consumer-sullied term NFT could really be simplified as an upgrade on creator economics.
Instead of Medium, you write on Mirror. Instead of Instagram, you post on Zora. Instead of investing your profits into MSFT, you buy DOGE.
The internet’s effect on markets is something we still struggle to accept; corporate careers are not 30+ years with pensions at the end. Everything contextualized to the point of commercial appeal is fair game for a microeconomic gestalt. We live at the edge of next creator economy.
Cleaning up the mess
The ‘21 bull run of pfps showed me two things:
the tech is undeniably attractive
the memeware was traditionally-outdated creator economics
If you reflect on the business model used by those projects, it was essentially taking large scale advances before any deliverables had arrived. The advances were to the tune of millions and the team members rarely had proven track records in their field.
We didn’t have scalable L2s and consumers would pay up to 5-7x purchase price on gas alone. The promises were of community, brand, and innovative-industry titanship.
All of this reeks of traditional creator economics. Agents in the guise of founders, labels in the guise of labs, venture capital as degen-punks, pitch decks as mint pages, and an overvalued appetite for maximizing market share.
It may seem a harsh evaluation, but it’s simply an examination of the mania (that I too was caught in) to find any insight into what is being formed in the current multi-year bear market.
New toys
We have less participants than before.
Yet things are significantly improving:
Nouns are upgrading their models (see Rage Quit discussion)
L2 Base Mainnet is live (see Open for Builders article)
Zora Network is actively growing (see Bridge)
Nouns Builder is deploying on L2s (see Goerli Testnet tweet)
Art Blocks engine is deploying on Arbitrum (see Prohibition)
Social apps are gaining adoption (see Interface, Farcaster, Deca, (GALLERY))
Expand and contract. Overcomplicate then simplify. Breathe in and then out. It’s all part of the ‘natural’ cycle to progress. But talks of “if [my ‘21 pfp] dies, then NFTs are over” are not only incorrect, but possibly inverted.
If your ‘21 pfp project that took in millions of dollars, had no business plan, now no royalties, and must make neo-traditional suits whole first fails… then maybe we are at the edge of the next creator economy.
Bonus reading
I read this article (ironically it’s on Medium) by Bryan Johnson on Zeroth-Principles Thinking. The gist of it is to radically reconsider a subject beyond the foundational perspective we deem ‘first principles’.
It’s an interesting, and possibly valuable, thought experiment when considering the next evolution of creator economics.
https://medium.com/future-literacy/zeroth-principles-thinking-9376d0b7e7f5
