Creating For One

Whenever you start something, it seems there is an expectation in the ether that it needs to grow immediately, have 1 million followers in the first month, and all these things. It doesn’t take long for you to be creating for this same arbitrary mashup of people.

When you create for that large of a group - you are trapped to make significant compromises that dilutes your work so much that you end up with a bunch of stale nothing for no one instead of an excellent little bit for a few.

We see this dynamic in brand planning every single year. Inevitably, the requirement is to grow the audience wider and increase volume. The primary effect of this effort is an alienation of the niche, caring audience that brought you this much success to begin with.

The antidote to this trap is to create for one. Picture the one person you’d like to serve in exact detail and focus on their needs when creating. Whenever we get caught up trying to expand rapidly, we can hear the late Anthony Bourdain’s advice.

“With Kitchen Confidential, I just didn’t give a shit at all what people might think. I didn’t think anyone was going to read it, so what did it matter. I just told the truth on every page.”