working in public

To understand why a creative must work in public, we need to start by looking at the business model of a studio.

A studio can have two sources of revenue: services and products. A service is client work, where you're putting in hours of your time at a fixed rate. Products sell in the background, generating revenue while you do other things. A critical mistake that a studio can make is to focus on services.

Sources into resources

Studio client work (services) generates typically generates byproducts. Templates, internal tooling, sketches and renders are all examples that can be could be sold as products with client permission.

The most important one of all however, is process work. It can be used as:

• Marketing/Storytelling: A studio sells design process as-a-service, displaying that design process online allows clients to know what they're buying
• An educational product: ie Workflows on Youtube that can be generate viewership monetization
• Filter out clients: Ball-kicking clients that just want advice will watch your process work instead of booking meetings and wasting time. Other clients that would be a bad fit would also realize by looking at your work. What's left are clients that like your work. By the time they reach out, they've already made the decision to hire you.
  In other words, process work is a growth cycle of service → product → more services. Not only that, but process work is already there, sitting there waiting for you to use as a byproduct of your services. Business benefit from turning sources into resources, and what better one to start with than with process work.

Infinite profit

When it's a one person team, you only have so many hours in the day where you can work. Not only that, margins of a service are capped. Every hour generates a set amount of profit but costs you a set amount of expenses.

Products on the other hand, can generate an infinite amount of profit. Unlike time which is capped at 24 hours a day, there is no theoretical limit to how much of a product you can sell. Digital products can also come with infinite margin, where a one-time creation cost results in unlimited product stock. At some point, the product profits overtake service profits, allowing you to be far more selective of your time. Fewer, higher quality clients leads to more sustainability.