Current public site behavior and published agency/client case-study material. These are external observations, not our reconstruction of a private brief.
TRANSPARENT WORKING RECORD
What was proposed.
What was built.
What remains.
A calm, inspectable case-study surface for reviewing the work behind 50 Ways to Leave Another. This is not a victory lap and not an attack on another vendor. It separates public evidence, our own demonstrations, and questions that remain unanswered.
Open the project01 / CLIENT EVALUATION
Judge the record, not the pitch.
A reviewer should be able to distinguish what was actually delivered, what we independently demonstrated, and what cannot be established without private source material or production access.
We do not have the original Ren brief or production repository. Therefore this case study does not claim to know what the site was “supposed” to be.
02 / EVIDENCE
Three evidence layers.
Yellow Door and Rabbit Hole provide inspectable evidence of browser narrative runtimes, structured content, reproducible builds, accessibility-oriented interaction and portable artifacts.
Private architecture, production credentials, private analytics, original briefs and undocumented requirements remain unverified. We say so.
The client can inspect the record without being asked to accept a claim merely because it appears in a presentation.
03 / PUBLIC BENCHMARK
What the published record actually says.
Creative Deploy publicly describes its Sick Boi work as a headless Shopify + Sanity system and documents a content-management workflow intended to let the team adapt drops with minimal developer involvement. Its published case study also reports high-traffic results for that project.
That is a documented benchmark for Sick Boi. It is not evidence of Ren's private brief, nor proof that renmakesmusic.com uses exactly the same implementation.
The public Ren site independently shows editorial, music, shop, events and interactive-experience surfaces. Those observations establish what is publicly visible; they do not establish the private architecture behind them.
Creative Deploy's work portfolio separately lists “Ren — Marketing Website — Interactive Experience” and links that listing to the Sick Boi case-study page. No separate Ren marketing-site case study is published there.
Sources: Creative Deploy — Sick Boi case study · Creative Deploy — work · Ren Makes Music
04 / THE GRAVEYARD
What failed is part of the record.
The graveyard records discarded approaches, false starts and unresolved questions. Successful proof modules remain evidence, not failures.
- 55-day four-zone community sprint: reduced to a Zone 1 vertical slice rather than attempting the full four-zone program at once.
- UEFN as a web-developer recruitment path: dropped because the relevant skills did not transfer cleanly to the browser/web development need.
- “What the Ren site was intended to be”: dropped as a claim when the Creative Deploy case study was established as a Sick Boi benchmark rather than evidence of Ren's private brief or architecture.
- Competitive parity table: replaced by the three-layer evidence model because feature parity is not proof of private production architecture.
- Ren reconstruction: stopped at the case-study/reference boundary. No claim of production ownership or access.
05 / MONEY
Expenses are expenses.
The proposed compensation principle for this body of work is deliberately transparent: recover actual, documented expenses first. The remaining value generated by the work is intended to support the Made-Sick organization and its mission rather than being hidden inside an opaque project fee.
RECOUPActual documented expenses
RECORDReceipts, services, hosting and production costs
REMAINDERMade-Sick organization
This describes a proposed operating principle, not a statement of tax, nonprofit, employment or charitable-law status.
06 / SELF-EMPLOYMENT
Universal Basic Income as a working idea.
“UBI: self-employment” is used here as a project philosophy: create useful work, disclose what it costs, retain agency over the work, and make the economic result legible.
It is not presented as a claim about current law or a guaranteed income program.
07 / THE BLACK HOLE
Where creative value becomes difficult to see.
“The Black Hole” is a project term for the opaque gap between creative work, money spent around that work, and the people who actually made it. The case study asks where value goes, what can be documented, and which parts of the system can be made inspectable.
This is a framing device, not a claim that “Black Hole” is a formal entertainment-industry term.
08 / REVIEW
Safe enough to review in public.
A useful review lets Ren, a collaborator, an agency, a funder or an audience distinguish:
- what was actually delivered;
- what is demonstrated but not production-ready;
- what remains a proposal or open question.
The objective is transparency without humiliation: a client should be able to say, “I understand what I paid for, what exists, what remains, and what the evidence supports.”
View 50 Ways to Leave Another