Thinking up is a way of changing the shape and amount of effort that goes into product creation, going higher, does not always mean creating more complexity.

This is a useful, though a litte boring, exercise for entering the world of programming, and moving from classical product creation into invention of multiuser platforms.

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Normally a product is for example 12 unique stylized photos, carefully generated by AI to look like a photo from a particular camera type.

Old photos have charm, if the AI operator has class, they can can totally sell it.

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There is a problem here, because, a bunch of little files won’t sell often, and there is no rush for people to buy little AI artworks.

It would be better, to program an application, that sells packs of files, here your customer is no longer the occasional geek looking for neat photos.

By taking a step higher, your customer, is the old you, all the creative folks, who see great potential in AI and need a store to sell their products at.

Not all people are focus on making a sale, some just need that step forward, to order their thoughts, and figure out where to go next.

You will find more customers here, they will pay you more, and they will rush towards you, because you are their next step.

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There is a problem here, you went from a trouble free binary fill, that never needs upgrades, to an e-commerce platform that will be under constant attack.

Automated computer programs are constantly scanning everything, their databases of exploits are constantly updated.

And you can ‘t block them, as most of the time, it is just random infected computers, and new ones are always popping up.

First thing you do, is create a static website, that has no dynamic code execution, it is just plain old files, that show a pretty website.

And then the moment someone click Sign-in, or Sign-up, you take them to a different server.

They get 10 tries to login, before they get suspended for an hour, and once logged in, you know who you are talking to.

It is no longer a random computer, but a specific username, you can suspend them, shadow ban them, or black list their email.

You will need an authentication system that checks username and passwords, an authorization system, that checks if user is allowed to perform an action.

And a rate limiter, a user can only make one request per 250 ms, or a reasonable number of requests per minute.

This will go a long way to prevent denial of service attacks, where a user or two, or a group, are constantly overwhelming the server.

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When you address the security issues, and frame them, in a pretty dashboard, you will feel safer to make a sale.

And the customer, who didn’t even know they had to worry about these things, will love it, nobody else is offering a dashboard like that.

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So that is great, but there is a problem, because, it is still hard to sell this, even if you sell pre-installed servers.

Here is where it gets interesting, rather than a single store, sell a marketplace, where multiple users setup stores under one domain name.

You can ask them to bring traffic, by posting to their social media, or just buying ads that lead to their store, where you can advertise other stores.

This requires on-boarding users, getting people to sign up, and upload huge images, that cost money in data traffic.

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So move up, and now sell a market place design platform, where the first thing your business users see, is a marketplace button.

Here they are able to purchase, what their marketplace will be about, plugins for selling specific digital goods, photos, music, fonts, icons, backgrounds.

Customers here, are able to design and launch marketplaces, aimed at selling a specific and unique combination of products.

Your customer is now a business person, who wants to create a multi-user platform, for selling digital products, that never expire, nor need warehousing.

They will not be surprised by the price of bandwidth, when they will be building a photo, or AI clip-art website.

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There is a half step that I skipped over to help you climb this up, without distractions.

Here, your customer is a programmer, interested in purchasing a blank platform, with good logs, diagnostics, and very little business specific code.

They will search for a multi-user platform, and a marketplace of plugins that get their project up and running safe and fast.

A lot of thinking must go into multi-user management, or community building tools, so when you set it up, they’ll look at your product.

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A meta product, is something that you climb all the way up, you come up with something you want to sell.

And then go up, and ask yourself, what if I sold stores for selling that product?

And then go up again, and ask what if I sold pre-configured multi store websites?

And then go up and ask, what if I sold a multi-store website creation tools.

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Up here, you’ll find you don’t have to host gigabytes of images, but a couple of megabytes, of code.

But there is a problem, because you have to maintain this whole thing, you have to monitor everything, and take care of all your customers.

And you will have a lot of customers, this final step, takes care of all these problems.

Here, you just sell the whole marketplace development network, it is a single sale, that includes the dot com domain name.

You maybe able to sell multiple copies, but overall, you move on to your next idea, take it all the way to the top, and then sell the entire dot com.