§1. I read a comment from VGR yesterday that said something like marketing is the furnishing of psychological conditions that cause an individual to want to be a customer. It is customer-making in the most material sense of the term 'making.' Maybe this framing isn't terribly novel, but it helps me differentiate it from sales, which I am naturally averse to, and it gives me footholds using which I feel comfortable traversing the act.
§2. Customer-making for Pond must rely on historical and philosophical and maybe even poetic narratives; what I cannot make use of are the quantitative metrics that seem standard for software products of our time. This is for two reasons: my customers are individuals and not businesses, and Pond is not designed to be a productivity tool; if the standards of productivity were imposed upon it it would perform worse than incumbents.
§2.1. Note that products whose marketing makes use of quantitative narratives rely on the surrounding cultural superstructure of productivity, consumerism, individualism, and scientism. They are parasitic on greater, historical currents of customer-making.
§3. If there is a metric that might make Pond look attractive it might have to do with how much more frequently one is accessing the contents of one's archives.
§4. All this hasn't escaped me; what I have written about Pond has taken the language of philosophy and history and mind: the narrative is one of liberation from a cosmotechnics which has delivered us a series of crises of the soul. At stake are our conceptions of knowledge and memory and how we relate to the world around us.
§5. Above is an attempt to write in the tone that I think is customer-making. I'll feel like a good writer when I can adopt and drop these styles at will.
§6. I wrote yesterday about how disappointing and anti-climatic Alex Danco's claim that following modernity and post-modernity is prediction(-ism?). I feel this way sometimes when I return to designing Pond after writing about it. After representationalism and computationalism is... a slightly differently designed Electron-wrapped React web-app? Surely I can be more ambitious in rethinking how we interface with technology if I can recognise the great flaws of our metaphysics. The trouble is hermeneutical: I lack the conceptual resources; and so we must begin with the disappointing, with the anti-climatic anti-realisations of our revolutionary visions, which themselves remain hazy yet, and gather substance as we labour and furnish our language (world) with the vocabulary (tools) necessary to describe (construct) them.
§7. A more practical note: I do not need to put forth and defend my theses on metaphysics in the pursuit of customer-making for Pond; I need only situate myself within those communities that sense the same dissatisfactions in which Pond finds its origins, and then fashion and share the narratives that lead one to Pond.
§7.1. There is a hint of manipulation about this strategy—I think it is no more than accompanies any effort to market or sell—so let me reframe the approach: here is a means of making my path to Pond explicit and legible to those who find themselves in proximal points of discontentment or disenchantment or curiosity. I'm engaging in customer-making insofar as it means offering a narrative that makes possible the recognition of Pond as valuable or appealing.
§8. There's something important here: I have to begin at the loci of discontent, and within the narratives that structure them; the path must take one from here to Pond, it cannot begin midway. The challenge is locating this starting point, because many of Pond's potential customers have already departed along different directions. Our consolation will be that they must still remember where they started from.
§9. So what is my customer-making, marketing strategy? Like Silvia once said, there are two main threads: (1) the mnemonic: make use of your archives, recollect and revive what you have thought and understood before; make it actively contribute to the present, to your being in the world, and (2) engage with AI in more meaningful, autonomy-preserving ways; re-centre yourself in an act of (AI-assisted) cognition—you are not its subject, nor its supervisor.