1:24
Want to be there.
Around 2011 the internet filled up with fan-made futures. Transparent iPhones. Holographic keyboards thrown onto the desk. Screens that wrapped around the edge of the glass. Millions of views each. Made by nobody, for no money.
coming attractions · uploaded by nobody · budget $0
Now showing, 2011
Unpaid demand for a future
Nobody commissioned these. Nobody was paid. People believed in the future being built so specifically that they rendered previews of it for free, and then argued in the comments about which preview was more correct. That is not marketing. That is the audience doing the marketing because it wants to be in the room when the thing arrives.
The company's only remaining job was to keep being worth the fan fiction.
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2:03
1:41
Nobody's future gets that treatment today. The fan-made genre for AI exists, and it runs in the other direction: not previews of the room people want to be in, but warnings about the room they are being pushed into. Same energy, opposite sign. Willingness to pay starts long before the price. It starts as wanting to be there in the first place.
Your gallery
Render the future you want
One line. Whatever you would sit up late and make a fake trailer for, with no budget and no permission. It gets shown back to you as a concept card, and it stays on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere. There is no server to send it to.
futures rendered here: 0 (yours only; we keep nothing)
No previews yet. The wall is waiting for something worth rendering.
The 2011 test
If nobody would make fan fiction of your roadmap for free, you have a product problem before you have a pricing problem.
Run it on anything you are building. Not "would they pay" but "would they render it, unpaid, before it exists, and defend the render in the comments." If the honest answer is no, the price is not the thing to fix first. The thing to fix is whether anyone wants to be there.
This page is the hopeful half of a harsher argument. The full version, including the part about what happens when the previews stop, is in 99 Cents.
Some futures get previews made by strangers.
Some things are worth building.
This message was brought to you by the Worth Building Institute. Results obvious.
see what's worth building →no concept videos were monetised in the making of this page. your renders live in your browser's localStorage and nowhere else. clearing site data takes the wall down. views on the archival cards are approximate, as they were then.