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Listen "141 – Creating a Minimum Viable Product That Sells as a Musician or Music Entrepreneur in 2019"
Episode Synopsis
If your music isn’t going to sell, wouldn’t you like to know sooner rather than later? Is there a way you can rapidly release music at less risk to test the market?
In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I share what a Minimum Viable Product is as well as how The Essential Guide to Creative Entrepreneurship came into being and who it’s for.
Download the PDF Transcription
Podcast Highlights:
00:34 – The Essential Guide to Creative Entrepreneurship
00:50 – The Essential Guide to Music Entrepreneurship
01:46 – Minimum viable product
04:46 – An offer that converts
05:05 – The inception and development of The Essential Guide to Creative Entrepreneurship book
08:16 – What is The Essential Guide to Creative Entrepreneurship about?
11:28 – Creating a series of Essential Guides
Transcription:
It’s The Essential Guide to Creative Entrepreneurship. I've been holding up this book a lot in videos lately. I don't know what's up with that. I do want to make you aware of the book so it's good in that sense.
Anyway, what is this all about? Why would you want it? Who cares?
Last year I came out with The Essential Guide to Music Entrepreneurship, and that sold very well. I actually got a really great response for that book as well, which is something that surprised me because here's kind of the secret behind that whole book – most of the content was already written before I put it out. It was on the website. It was on davidandrewwiebe.com.
I had written this guide on what it meant to be a musicpreneur or music entrepreneur here in the digital age. What I did was I took that content, I edited it, I updated it, I revised it. I added an introduction and a conclusion. I curated a few more blog posts, and voila, that was The Essential Guide to Music Entrepreneurship.
The feedback has been far better than I ever anticipated. So much so that I thought, well, this is what I would call a minimum viable product. If you haven't heard of that term before, if you don't know what an MVP is, a minimum viable product is like the least amount of content you need to make something that people would buy, or people would be interested in.
That's a good concept for you to know as a musician to learn this whole thing about minimum viable product because as musicians we tend to obsess over perfection, getting something just right, making sure the vocals are in tune, making sure the guitar sound right, making sure the drums are exactly as we want them to be in the studio.
And then that often ends up being relegated or delegated to a producer or an engineer and sometimes musicians do it themselves too, right? I've certainly produced my own tracks.
We obsess about all these things not realizing that maybe 80% is good enough to get a feel for what people think about it. 80% is maybe not enough to get on the radio, to get in front of influencers, to get your music in front of a major label or anything like that, but it's enough to get a feel for what people think about it.
They might go, “Hey, this is great. I love this.” Or they might go, “This is all right.” But the thing is if you got it 80% of the way there and people didn't like it then you didn't waste a ton of time and energy and money. You still wasted some of your resources. I still wouldn't say it's a waste because everything is a test and experiment anyway as an entrepreneur, as a musician, as a creative.
In some capacity, practically everything is an experiment. I've experimented with a lot of things. Trust me, a lot of them didn't go well.
But there's that extra 20% to take it to 100%. That 20% probably would cost you more in time, and resources, and energy, and everything to get your product perfect. If nobody likes the product, what was the point in spending all that time and money and energy on that? No point, right? So that's the whole thing about a minimum viable product.
Guess what?
If your music isn’t going to sell, wouldn’t you like to know sooner rather than later? Is there a way you can rapidly release music at less risk to test the market?
In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I share what a Minimum Viable Product is as well as how The Essential Guide to Creative Entrepreneurship came into being and who it’s for.
Download the PDF Transcription
Podcast Highlights:
00:34 – The Essential Guide to Creative Entrepreneurship
00:50 – The Essential Guide to Music Entrepreneurship
01:46 – Minimum viable product
04:46 – An offer that converts
05:05 – The inception and development of The Essential Guide to Creative Entrepreneurship book
08:16 – What is The Essential Guide to Creative Entrepreneurship about?
11:28 – Creating a series of Essential Guides
Transcription:
It’s The Essential Guide to Creative Entrepreneurship. I've been holding up this book a lot in videos lately. I don't know what's up with that. I do want to make you aware of the book so it's good in that sense.
Anyway, what is this all about? Why would you want it? Who cares?
Last year I came out with The Essential Guide to Music Entrepreneurship, and that sold very well. I actually got a really great response for that book as well, which is something that surprised me because here's kind of the secret behind that whole book – most of the content was already written before I put it out. It was on the website. It was on davidandrewwiebe.com.
I had written this guide on what it meant to be a musicpreneur or music entrepreneur here in the digital age. What I did was I took that content, I edited it, I updated it, I revised it. I added an introduction and a conclusion. I curated a few more blog posts, and voila, that was The Essential Guide to Music Entrepreneurship.
The feedback has been far better than I ever anticipated. So much so that I thought, well, this is what I would call a minimum viable product. If you haven't heard of that term before, if you don't know what an MVP is, a minimum viable product is like the least amount of content you need to make something that people would buy, or people would be interested in.
That's a good concept for you to know as a musician to learn this whole thing about minimum viable product because as musicians we tend to obsess over perfection, getting something just right, making sure the vocals are in tune, making sure the guitar sound right, making sure the drums are exactly as we want them to be in the studio.
And then that often ends up being relegated or delegated to a producer or an engineer and sometimes musicians do it themselves too, right? I've certainly produced my own tracks.
We obsess about all these things not realizing that maybe 80% is good enough to get a feel for what people think about it. 80% is maybe not enough to get on the radio, to get in front of influencers, to get your music in front of a major label or anything like that, but it's enough to get a feel for what people think about it.
They might go, “Hey, this is great. I love this.” Or they might go, “This is all right.” But the thing is if you got it 80% of the way there and people didn't like it then you didn't waste a ton of time and energy and money. You still wasted some of your resources. I still wouldn't say it's a waste because everything is a test and experiment anyway as an entrepreneur, as a musician, as a creative.
In some capacity, practically everything is an experiment. I've experimented with a lot of things. Trust me, a lot of them didn't go well.
But there's that extra 20% to take it to 100%. That 20% probably would cost you more in time, and resources, and energy, and everything to get your product perfect. If nobody likes the product, what was the point in spending all that time and money and energy on that? No point, right? So that's the whole thing about a minimum viable product.
Guess what?
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