This is an archive of email #2 in my enrollment series for TDWB (Oct 2024).
⦿
When I started working on Tiny Digital Worlds: The Principles, the scope was wide.
I operated under the assumption that any digital business, regardless of what it sold, would likely benefit from applying the principles of digital world-building (in one way or another).
Whether those are e-commerce businesses selling “widgets,” fiction authors selling “stories,” knowledge workers selling “ideas,” coaches selling “expertise,” etc.
However, as it turned out, this wasn’t exactly the case.
And this was surprising to me!
(I love it when I am surprised because it reveals a blind spot or something new, perhaps a nuance, to add to my model of the world.)
As I interrogated and externalized my thinking (over months), what revealed itself on the page was that “ideas” and “expertise” (intangible knowledge) were tightly bound up across all the principles I was capturing.
Transacting in and building a world around our “ideas” and “expertise” is the controlling idea embedded throughout the training.
Does this mean ‘Tiny Digital Worlds: The Principles’ is useless or ineffective for an e-commerce business?
… or for a storyteller who writes fiction?
I suppose the most truthful answer is “It depends.”
As I created ‘The Principles’ training, I realized I was creating a framework for building a “World” around our (intangible) ideas.
This concept is particularly suited to knowledge-based businesses across diverse domains and interests, which I’ve been doing since 2003.
From the perspective of individuals seeking these ideas, when they encounter a rich environment (= World) exploring the ideas they’re seeking to understand more about or master to a degree, they’re implicitly attracted … drawn closer in.
For instance, consider:
- Those drawn to learning the nuances and dimensions of digital marketing and building customer-funded businesses (like us)…
- Individuals wanting to understand chess (or Ruby/Python or Lisp/Racket or PHP/WordPress development) more deeply…
- People aspiring to become faster (sim) racers…
- Or folks with a need to learn to write fiction as a creative outlet, whether professionally or purely for pleasure…
Full transparency: this is my personal list.
In all these scenarios, digital world-building can create an immersive environment that affords richer learning and engagement.
Implicit in all of these desires is an understanding that time investment (measured in years and decades!) is a prerequisite for improving at a craft or achieving a desired level of mastery.
This time commitment is a crucial element that digital world-building leverages with far richer nuance and depth.
Embedded in this implicit understanding is a critical ingredient that digital world-building takes advantage of:
Time is a beautiful pre-qualifier!
I’ll use an obvious example that’s a common frame of reference…
“Nobody” believes they can learn everything they need to build an internet business from zero (with no skills, experience, or expertise) to six figures a year from one Amazon book or Udemy course (or any fill-in-the-blank digital course).
Well … some people do.
… and therefore, they implicitly (and automatically) prequalify themselves when they encounter a marketing message that goes counter to their belief (or misguided desire).
However, the opposite is just as powerful…
People who are serious, with the right worldview (based on reality), come to the party expecting(!) a longer time horizon to sharpen their craft and, for example, learn to build a six-figure-a-year business.
… or learn how to build a better way of attracting and interacting with an audience (or a framing I prefer: “citizens,” which I’ll unpack in the following email).
This same dynamic, broadly speaking, can’t be said for an e-commerce business selling, for example, jewelry or rucksacks or apparel or skin care products for men and women.
If someone hears about Maui Nui Venison on a podcast and desires high-quality, low-fat meat, they’ll visit the store and purchase.
The sales cycle is as close to instant as one can get (within a particular income bracket).
If they love their purchase, they’ll likely reorder, perhaps expanding to other products in the range.
… or set up a subscription — a ‘Ohana Box — to receive delicious, nutritious monthly meat shipments.
The dynamics of learning a craft (and becoming better over time) are very different from ordering a commodity where skill acquisition plays no role.
To this degree, ‘Tiny Digital Worlds: The Principles’ is for knowledge-based creators — people who sell knowledge, ideas, and expertise to people expecting to sharpen their skills over time (years and decades!).
(In the future, this will evolve because I have ideas for how to adapt ‘The Principles’ for other non-knowledge-based categories of digital businesses.)
(To be continued…)
André “Worlds = containers for ideas” Chaperon
