Seeing Abundance Everywhere
4 Case Studies of Abundant Systems Observed in the Wild
For the past few months, I’ve been talking a lot about abundant systems, and how I’m attempting to build them. Today, though, I wanted to take a different approach.
I want to highlight others that are building abundant systems and simply calling them something else.
“An abundant system by any other name would be as generous.”
An abundant system is a system in which any participant's success adds to the groups success. That means incentives have to align between the individual and group. It's an exponential growth system, meaning that the majority of the value comes in the future, so it doesn't worry about being highly transactional in the now, because the future holds the abundant results that mean plenty for everyone involved. There's inherent generosity in abundant systems.
That means there are typically three things needed in order to start an abundant system:
The system creator - systems don’t spawn on their own. They are designed by people. That means there is usually a central creator (or small group of creators) who come together to kick things off. In the early days, there usually aren’t many payoffs, because an exponential growth system starts slowly, but over time compounds into something much more valuable.
A Community - in order to be generous, there need to be people to be generous with. The creator brings a larger group together with them on the journey and creates an environment that becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Time - it takes time for an abundant system to grow. That means there needs to be a focus on building for long-term results, not short-term exits.
So who is currently building systems that fit this bill?
Case Study 1: Jay Clouse and The Lab
Jay is the founder of Creator Science, a newsletter + podcast I’ve been a big fan of for years now. He’s one of the people I’ve spent a lot of time watching as an example of what the Creator Economy can yield. He’s got a reputation for being generous and helpful with people, and he’s always spoken highly of by other creators. He seems to be my favorite creators’ favorite creator too. That tells me that he’s someone who knows what he is doing, because that’s always something I look at when evaluating the authority of someone in a space - who are the experts in the space looking to for advice?
In the Creator Economy, it’s Jay Clouse. And a couple of weeks ago, he shared a tactic that was a perfect example of an abundant system in action: Members as Affiliates.
His community is called the Lab. It’s a community that has a capped size, and is for creators at a certain level. It’s a mastermind, but at a larger scale than most. It’s a high-ticket community for a reason - the value created and shared in the Lab is immense.
There were a few aspects that stood out to me here.
Members know the value of the community. They spend time there, so they should be your best source of new members. And they aren’t likely to invite people that will degrade the quality of the community.
Affiliates are paid out for life, not just a one-time fee. That incentivizes members to bring in new members that will fit for a longer length of time, not just someone who joins and then immediately churns.
Turns a Cost Center into a Profit Center - this means that there can be financial ROI in addition to the less tangible ROI that a high-level community can deliver.
Case Study 2: Eli Finer - Rock Solid Pipeline
Eli is a coach that I’ve been following for a long time. And he recently launched a program that was another great example of an abundant system: Rock Solid Pipeline.
Note: He recently restarted his Twitter account because he realized his old account wasn’t working the way he wanted it to. Follow his new account here.
There’s a lot that I like about this program, and I can say it confidently, because I ended up joining it. At first, I didn’t think I was a fit for it, because I was trying to break away from the idea of being a “developer”. That’s one of those limiting labels I’ve wanted to shed. But after talking with him and wanting 1-1 coaching that I couldn’t afford yet, he suggested I join the program. Because even if I wasn’t trying to identify as a developer anymore, there’s something I couldn’t get away from: I’ve got the brain of a developer, and Eli is great at helping me to translate non-developer concepts to concepts that I understand and appreciate.
This program is a great example because of how it’s set up:
There’s no upfront cost. Since it’s geared towards people who are having trouble selling, it’s hard to get money from them at first. That means it’s easier to trust the program because there’s no risk.
Eli is incentivized to help the people in the program. If they don’t succeed, he isn’t rewarded for this time. There’s no guaranteed payday, so he has to be confident in his ability to deliver results, which he obviously is.
Because of the exponential growth possibilities, he can end up winning much more than if he charged a set price. If one student has outsized success, it can end up multiplying the overall value of the program.
Something to pay attention to as well: this is actually similar to a venture capital model. VCs will make lots of bets with the hopes that 1 bet will make the entire fund profitable. There’s a reason that model exists the way it does. There are a lot of things wrong with the implementation, but the general idea makes sense mathematically.
Case Study 3: Daren Smith - Producer.fund
Daren is another creator I have followed for awhile now. He’s in the film space and helps creators build meaningful systems around their business that make them more sustainable, repeatable, and scalable.
With Producer.fund, he’s raising a fund to create 5 independent films using an indie model: instead of raising a bunch of money upfront that needs to be spent and then returned, he’s instead focusing on giving everyone involved part of the upside.
In this case, the “community” Daren is focused on is everyone involved in making a film. But the model still applies, because there’s less of a focus on everyone getting paid as much as possible now, and more focus on making things as high-quality as possible leading to a much larger future return.
I particularly love Daren’s focus on transparency. That’s where trust is built, because even if things don’t work out, you know his heart and efforts were in the right place. That incentivizes long-term relationships that extend beyond a single project.
Case Study 4: The Toronto Ecosystem Fund
This is one I haven’t followed as closely, but I saw this tweet and identified it as an abundant system:
If you notice, it has a lot of similarities to what I’m trying to do with my Experiment in Understanding Human Value.
Deploying capital to people who need it and trying to understand the effects. Instead of worrying about returns, it’s about collecting information that will be used to create a more valuable ecosystem. That’s something that isn’t understood as well when we try to turn everything into transactional relationships. (That’s something I think a lot of VCs end up getting wrong, because of the competitive nature of capital deployment).
When you build a stronger ecosystem by pulling in and distributing resources, the community is less starved for resources. That means more energy can be put into growth vs survival. When people aren’t worried about how they are going to survive, they can grow a lot more freely.
When You See It, You Can’t Un-see It
Once you truly understand abundant systems, you start seeing them everywhere. It’s a great example of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, where you start seeing something everywhere. But it’s actually a great use of the phenomenon, because when you see abundance everywhere, you start believing that abundance is everywhere. And once you believe that abundance is everywhere, you feel free to be generous. When you are generous, you end up creating an abundant system around you, with the community just being the people you interact with.
Then people see that, and when they get an idea of what abundant systems look like, the idea can spread. And when the idea spreads, the world becomes more generous.
And when the world becomes more generous, the future becomes a brighter place.