The MVP (Coffee with Composers 005)

Transcript

You may have noticed that this podcast doesn’t have any intro music or music at all, but at the same time I run a business where I create these assets for brands and content creators. How does this make any sense?

I am a strong believer in rapid prototyping and leading with an MVP - or minimal viable product. An MVP is the easiest to accomplish version of your idea that gets the job done and allows you to start learning about your audience. So in that end, this “unpolished” and low production value version of the podcast is my MVP - and just having this out here has already opened so many doors and connections for me even without intro music or proper advertising in place yet.

So don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. In the book, “Art & Fear” by David Bayles the author tells this story of an experiment an art teacher ran. In this experiment, the teacher divided the class up into two groups. The first portion would be graded on the quality of the work they do and the second would be graded on the quantity.

The group producing who’s goal was quantity, would be graded on the weight of their total number of pots. But the group graded on quality would be allowed to make just one pot. “The Perfect Pot”

The quality group spent their semester studying everything they could and theorizing what makes the perfect pot. Eventually they produced the one pot necessary for the class to the best of their ability. The quantity group just got to work and started making theirs. Over time, they were learning through experience and their pots improved in quality as they made mistakes and learned what caused them. At the end of the semester, they ended up making higher quality pots than the quality group!

This little story demonstrates the importance of just getting into the weeds and working. Quality comes from quantity. You can read every book on a topic, listen to every mentor and learn as much as you possibly can. But until you are actually doing the work, you can’t actually apply these ideas and learn for yourself.

So start writing and revise later. If you don’t know where to begin just start. Don’t wait for the perfect udnerstanding of what you do to start letting you do what you do. You will learn far more by doing than you will by reading. And this applies to all forms of art. Don’t theorize how to make a post that will go viral, make the post and then figure out why it didn’t. Continually learn from your experiments. An artist discovers themself through the process of creating art.

This is a unique responsibility we carry as artists. In short, we must always strive to “Fuck around and find out”