The Exchanges

Q Okay, so you've built this ecosystem, and you didn't talk about daily manifest, which really, in my opinion, is the entry to You know, the entry portal. Can you actually talk a little bit about that?

A So we skipped over that. That was actually the first product. So before the David Perel thing that we talked about, um, when I was making this transition from like agency burned out crazy, like everyone else has control over your day, right? You're just like reacting to meetings and deadlines that are being set externally. Once I decided to stop doing that, I had to, like, consciously make an effort to plan out my days, and the Daily Manifest was like this little tool that I used to scribble out on a piece of A-Fort paper, and, uh, when I was putting content out on Instagram, sharing all these ideas that I was really latching onto or that were really helping me, like, Think about how to build, uh, visualize value or transition it into a proper brand and business from this like chaotic service world I was living in. A lot of the feedback I got from people was time management. You know, I'm procrastinating. I can't manage my days. I don't know how to like Consistently work on something. And the daily manifest was just like a test product. I was like, okay, I'll take this thing that I write down every day, formalize it, basically put it into a template in Figma and, uh, package it up and give people access to the PDF and a community on the side. So you buy the plan with the plan comes or the, by the template, sorry. And with the template comes access to what was at the time of Wha…

AI assessment note: “That was actually the first product... Daily Manifest was like this little tool”

Q Okay. Oh, with all this, you know, GTP three dolly stuff and that getting bigger and bigger in 2030. Will there be more graphic designers or less graphic designers than there are today?

A Interesting. I think, I think less people calling themselves graphic designers, but more people doing graphic design and inverted commas, more people like generating visuals, whether that's like through a text interface or like sitting down. And, uh, I, I kind of view it like the, uh, You know, if you were a graphic designer in the sixties, you have this like wooden drawing board where you're like sliding rules across and, you know, taking out letter press type forms and gluing them on one by one from that transition to Adobe illustrator. There's a huge leap in technology. And then there's. You know, the ability to create prompts, there's still going to be differentiated outputs based on the talent of the person who is, who is using the technology. So I think in general, I think a lot of these titles would just kind of fade away and it's like, Greg and Jack. These are the things that we do and we're interested in, and this is our network versus there's a good, there's a great meme about like job titles in the past, job titles in the future. I'm sure you've seen it. And like, it goes from, I don't know, uh, blacksmith to GPT three prompt engineer or discord community manager. And, uh, I don't know. I just think job titles in general, uh, probably gonna be, uh, Not as prominent in our culture in 10, 20, 30 years time, especially for the terminally online, like ourselves.

AI assessment note: “less people calling themselves graphic designers, but more people doing graphic design”

Q don't know how it, you know, how it worked, but like the milk was frothed, and the beans were grinded, and the water, like, that's web three at scale, is like the automatic cappuccino maker, basically. So I think the cappuccino maker piece you like, and the other piece is just the art piece, right? Like, if you're gonna create art, why not give people the opportunity to collect it?

A Yeah, and if you're like gonna support a network, If you're going to give your time, energy, anything, you're going to contribute anything to a network, then the technology that exists to share upside in the growth of that network is, uh, currently limited, but with time over time, that's, I think the, the web three promise, right? I was like, I've spent hundreds or thousands of hours sharing posts from this thing or talking in the discord or making suggestions for what to do next. Or contributing to a product. And in like an internet native world, hiring everybody as a contractor or W two employee that wants to contribute to the network is just not possible. Like it's literally not possible. So the friction that you can remove by tokenizing some of that process is, uh, is what's very interesting. But I think a lot of it is, is both behavior and just structuring entities. And a lot of. My frustration with web three is people go, come at it from the wrong end. You don't need any of that technology to build the bond between the people necessarily. I think there are a few examples where like, you know, people who built Ethereum, for example, have a common goal and incredible like bond over the technology itself. But You know, to try and spin up a community just based on the fact it's, uh, the same thing that already exists, but there's some web three infrastructure from zero. I fi…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, and if you're like gonna support a network, If you're going to give your time”

Q Slack has, we don't sell saddles here. I think it's important, you know, when you're coming up with an idea for a product, Or you want to come up with an idea for a product based on an audience, which is what you had is thinking about what are different phrases that could come to mind? Um, and what are, uh, emerging phrases, um, and how could you own them?

A Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a lot of that came from the advertising world too. You know, when you're like, In a war room, in an agency environment, and you have to distill this entire brand story or product story into something that fits on a subway ad or, you know, a banner or a out of home ad that somebody's driving past at 70 miles an hour. That muscle memory, I think that I picked up in those environments definitely helped Teach me the lesson that language is just incredibly powerful. The first guy I ever worked for was a creative director with a writing background, and that, you know, as I came out of school, I put way I'd put so much more emphasis on how something looked or the, you know, the nuances of the visuals. Cause I was a graphic designer. Um, and then when you get into a commercial environment, you start to get introduced to like what persuasion is, what advertising is and how even looking at like print ads, if you, if you run through like a David Ogilvy annual or any kind of OG Advertising character. They've got these print ads where there's five words on a piece of paper and it just like knocks you over how clever it is. This is another lesson I learned from being a designer is going into interviews and thinking that I was going to have to present my, you know, degree, the way I thought about everything and like Kind of communicate my perspective versus just sho…

AI assessment note: “a lot of that came from the advertising world too”

Q do this with that, and while you're doing all this, you're building new products, new educational products, new communities, You're selling things. We haven't talked about web three and we will, but you're selling things on foundation, NFTs, et cetera. Um, but thank you for explaining a little bit about how we got here. Where are we today with the business and you know, where are you going with it?

A Sure. Yeah. I think, um, One of the things, and this is the first, um, conversation I'm having publicly about some of these milestones, so Visualize Value was also started mid-pandemic, or like early pandemic, so there were a lot of different tailwinds that made It popular at the beginning that I, you know, was aware of at the time, but in hindsight with like behavior changing back closer to what it was before the pandemic, there's a few, a few ways in which that's affected the business. So obviously I don't have any metrics on it. Somebody's probably done this research, but maybe screen time was up three, four, five X two years ago. Everybody's just sat in front of their computer all day long. And we didn't know how long this thing was going to last and everybody's trying to figure out how to become more economically resilient, like start participating on the internet, et cetera, et cetera. So this is like blowing up at the same time that visualize value is building all these digital resources. I think that was. Twenty-twenty. So our biggest, like, just exploded in twenty-twenty. That was like, you know, critical mass, got to probably 10,000 students by the end of twenty-twenty from the summer. Um, last year, NFT craziness. Visualize value is still growing on the community and education side, but not at the same clip it was in twenty-twenty. Still does very well, but the NFT N…

AI assessment note: “Visualize value is still growing on the community and education side, but not at the same clip”