I can't remember which article it was, but Steve Pavlina said people often ask him, "ok I've written my book, now how do I sell it?" and he's like, "you dingus! You're supposed to get the audience first, and then create for them!"
So there's a spectrum, from creating in silence to creating in public, which is perhaps down to personal preference or temperament (introversion / extraversion?).
I've often seen people launch mailing lists and pre-orders for products, books, courses, of which they have not yet written a single line. So their early users get a discount in exchange for providing invaluable feedback during the development process.
Creation should require some form of bravery, blindly plunging into the unknown. Not knowing how the creation will be received until it’s actually created.
In the past decade people have been getting burnt out on all these lean startup, kickstarting fucks that just want to test for a market or audience before building out a product. The end result is we are bombarded with vaporware products, services, books, that we have to show interest in or worse put some money down before the creator decides to actually create anything. This makes people skeptical of “new” offerings. The consumer wants a product right away, not a promise. Also, the end product becomes subject to the tyranny of whatever can be tested for with pre-marketing.
The risk needs to shift back onto the creator. I’m talking big designs upfront; products coming to market ready to consume. If it does poorly, the creator just takes the hit in the form of wasted time and money. This is how things used to be, before a generation of entrepreneurs decided they wanted to be risk averse and try out a hundred half baked ideas rather than one idea really well thought out. It seems that as the skill of getting products right on the first try began to wane, “lean” processes began to grow in popularity.
> I've often seen people launch mailing lists and pre-orders for products, books, courses, of which they have not yet written a single line.
I can spot these people from a mile away.
What they're doing is antithetical to the sentiment expressed in this post, which is about being creative. Not doing pre-marketing for some side hustle course or e-book.
Steve himself has launched courses which are entirely improvised from day 1. He did the same thing with live seminars and that seemed to go very well for him.
I'd say that counts as a highly creative act, and is the polar opposite of working in silence.
> I've often seen people launch mailing lists and pre-orders for products, books, courses, of which they have not yet written a single line. So their early users get a discount in exchange for providing invaluable feedback during the development process.
Or, more often, their users get nothing at all.
I steer clear of people doing this. It's one thing get other people's feedback on what's clearly communicated as just an idea, or a work in progress. It's another thing to claim you have a ready (or launching any minute now!) product/service, while all you really have is a webpage full of lies and a textbox for victims of your con artistry to leave their contact information, so you can "gauge interest" / "determine market size" (and possibly spam those e-mails later with something else). The latter I consider dishonest, and on the off chance someone doing this actually launches their thing, I'll already be biased against purchasing/subscribing.
The ones I've seen were completely honest about the situation. "Here's what I'm making, here's when I expect to launch, the first part will come out in a month, if you sign up now you get early access and a nice discount, and you can help me shape the final product."
> You're supposed to get the audience first, and then create for them
This is certainly the smart thing to do, but there’s something about “creating something for an audience” that stops my creative juices from flowing. I guess there are too many thoughts about how this will be received and what people might think, that it stops me from creating truly great work.
So there's a spectrum, from creating in silence to creating in public, which is perhaps down to personal preference or temperament (introversion / extraversion?).
I've often seen people launch mailing lists and pre-orders for products, books, courses, of which they have not yet written a single line. So their early users get a discount in exchange for providing invaluable feedback during the development process.