Can you "solve for distribution" w/o selling your soul?
Some nuance on the trade-offs in "Solving For Distribution" | 100 DoW#73
Hey friends,
Good ‘ol Visa tweeted this thread (see below), which I actually agree with, but I felt it didn’t consider some trade-offs (which he doesn’t have to caveat in a thread, of course, but that I feel are interesting to talk about).
So I started writing a reply, which became very long, which made me decide to write a small post on it (cause I guess I have something to say on the matter).
Visa’s thread:
Ok, let me start by saying I agree with the logical steps & outcome.
I've seen this happen in the wild. But I’m still gonna play the devil's advocate here—by asking a question—cause I think there's value in looking at the (possible) trade-offs.
The question
Can we really make a fair comparison if one of these food truck or author folks likes marketing & one doesn't?
My (not so hypothetical) answer
I think that the one who doesn't like marketing (or less so) will chip away a little bit of their soul/self each time they do work they hate doing, in this case, marketing, which would very quickly turn out to be a net negative, even with the value add of a bigger distribution.
Let’s dig a bit deeper into this chipping-away-at-your-soul thing
Marketing is partially manipulative, especially so when it's done “well.” I.e., in a way such that people hardly notice they are being marketed to. The food truck person who does that marketing well has to be(come) a skilled manipulator, even when delivering on promises.
Doing all that marketing, their mind is occupied with crafting a marketing scheme to get better distribution, making them spend less time on what they enjoy most. Doing foodtrucky stuff.
Is this really The Better outcome?
You could argue that if they don't solve for distribution, they won't get customers and won't be able to run their food truck. Losing the work they actually like doing. And yes, that might be true, but definitely not always. It’s not a winner-take-all world in most creative work, and making good food is an art. So the food truck dude/chick might very well be better off doing what they’re good at instead of doing a shitty job at marketing as much as possible.
Then there is the limit to how far one should go with marketing.
If you have enough to make a livelihood, doing more, at the cost of doing your creative thing, is just greedy. (The emphasis here is key.)
That’s why most marketing you see is from, relatively speaking, shitty-product people. People who make a living and think that’s enough make up a small part of the marketing landscape. So you see mostly stuff from the louder and greedier ones. They are usually the ones with the biggest social accounts (Visa is one of the few exceptions here btw).
Circling back to the losing your soul/self thing.
I’m not sure that the loudest “creators” (the word creator is almost becoming synonymous with “content creator,” and that with “marketer,” nowadays) are happy.
They’re so loud, wanting so much attention over actually doing the creative work, that it sounds like just another way to fill the gaping God-shaped hole, which can never be filled with outside things.
IMO, this has also been a clear realization among many in the productivity-creator-marketing community on Twitter. Many creators who became famous for being good marketers (but not especially superb writers) have suddenly stepped off the marketing wheel and started talking about being authentic and creative because they realized the poor trade-off they made. I.e., selling their soul.
I think that realization is good btw, but I feel it's better to realize beforehand that there is a trade-off between putting money-making first or the art first. And the balance there is key, and different for everyone, depending on how much you like marketing, for one.
NB. My thoughts on this are still kinda not totally completely clear. But writing this is clearing things up! So please do feel free to discuss!
Cheers!
Jibran