One of the fundamental ideas behind building reputation online is consistently generating proof of work. The beauty of this idea is that most people are already doing it (they're just not sharing it).
Everything you do is valuable to two audiences:
1. Clients will trust that you can do it for them.
2. Customers will trust that you can teach them how to do it.
The concept of selling sawdust is simply sharing the byproduct of your work.
For example: In developing this course, I have written pages and pages of notes that will fuel front-end content for months, I'll expand one-line notes into emails, Twitter threads, and Office Hours content for the VV community.
The fidelity of your ideas increases as you share them.
A powerful idea by Marc Andreesen summarizes the value of proving yourself in public. You don't know what's going to resonate with your audience until you publish.
If you build your audience on top of demonstrable proof, the path to product and service sales is frictionless.
Example:
Person x follows you because they are interested in you sharing how you're building your business. When you release a product that they can use to get a closer look at the nuance of your strategy, they're already bought in, you just need to collect the credit card details.
Continually proving your ability to generate a result is what builds trust with your audience, and drives sales of your products and services.
In the context of Visualize Value, sawdust is everything from repurposing presentations as front-end marketing assets:
To sharing behind the scenes content of product development:
Pictured: The VV 2019 Annual (now sold out)