Minimum viable content
Removing friction in the “make art > share art” process
I love creating, but I hate the post-production, aka all the work that goes into making it presentable.
I love writing, but not so much in revising. I love shooting videos, but I don’t enjoy laboriously stitching them together. I love taking photos, yet I dread the process of choosing the best five from the 300+ I take. Ugh, boring.
This is a problem because the post-production often stops me from sharing what I create. Right now, I have 11 future YouTube videos sitting on my hard drive. I’ve shot all the footage, but I can’t muster the willpower to edit them. I can’t even bring myself to plug in the drive.
My solution? An approach that I call minimum viable content.
Being a maximalist creator
I love sharing what I make. I think of myself as a maximalist creator. On Substack, I share weekly essays, monthly update videos, media logs, and quick ideas on Notes. I post my photography and paintings on two Instagram accounts. My YouTube channel isn’t dead yet either. If you want to see my stuff, have at it.
I see my prolificacy as similar to Michael Dean and Taylor Swift.
shares a huge range of Substack posts, from typewriter essays to thought logs. Taylor Swift casually drops 31 songs for an album and has many more in her vault.I want to share most of what I’ve made. I don’t like having a strong filter, like, “Oh this video isn’t edited well enough, so it’s not going up on the channel”. If post-production stops me from sharing my ideas, I strip that out as much as possible. I’d rather move from “make art” to “share art” with as little friction as possible.
Example: Instagram reel
I tried this idea when I wanted to make content around the idea of “Do today’s Hard Thing”, which was something I posted every day on Substack Notes and Instagram stories this week. Initially, I envisioned a short-form video with cinematic-esque shots: me getting ready for the gym, footage from the fitness competition I joined in November, me sitting down at my desk after a workout. But the thought of recording all that felt too hard. I put off doing it for two weeks.
Then I remembered: minimum viable content. I already had exercise footage in my phone, so I considered splicing together a few clips. But even that felt like too much work. What if the video was just one clip? I found a 42-second video in my Photos album. That’s perfect for a reel. I recorded a voiceover, and the reel was live. It took 20 minutes.
Minimum viable content means that the final result will never be as polished or perfect as art that takes deliberate post-production. But my art gets to leave the drafts folder.
Another example: Recording videos for Substack
Last November, I had the idea of creating monthly video logs about what I’m up to and the creative projects I’m working on. Instead of filming with my Sony ZVE-10 camera, chucking the footage into video editing software Final Cut Pro, and editing it all nice with colour grading and music, I did something else.
I recorded the video logs straight on a website called riverside.fm, which I think is meant to be a recording platform for podcasts. The platform’s true appeal for me is how easy they make editing. The site automatically transcribes my video, so to cut footage where I stumble over my words, all I have to do is delete the corresponding words from the transcript. It’s a lot faster than using Final Cut.
Sure, I can’t colour grade, and the free version slaps the Riverside logo on the export, but I don’t mind. The cost of the watermark is far smaller than the cost of not sharing my logs.
By keeping the post-production process to a minimum (and immensely reducing the friction), uploading these monthly videos doesn’t feel like a heavy lift anymore. This is my iterative thought process for every creative pursuit now: “If I remove X part of the process, does that make me want to do it?”. I keep removing steps until the answer is “Yes”. Editing on Riverside felt like a “Yes” because it didn’t weigh me down the way Final Cut would.
Minimum viable content in action
Here are some other ways I’ve embraced minimum viable content:
I shoot film photos instead of digital. Film naturally limits me to 36 frames per roll limit, so I don’t have to sift through hundreds of images.
I only do light edits for my media logs.
I publish journal entries as is.
I post my ideas on Substack notes before fleshing them out into full essays (this essay was a note I wrote 3 weeks ago!)
I’m curious: if you create content online, does post-production weigh you down too? What are the ways you’ve stripped down your processes to the bare minimum? I’d love to learn more ways to streamline the “make art > share art” process.
Thank you to folks who helped with the post-production of this one: and Jennifer Scott.
Update log:
✏️ I’m hosting Substack housekeeping session for writers on Wednesday evening ET. Because when’s the last time you updated your About page? ...Me too. I’m hosting a chill co-working session next week to fix that (it's about time): https://lu.ma/8zan97sz
💭 Wrote out my ideal end state, an exercise in envisioning the lifestyle I want to achieve.
📕 Read The Best Girls by Min Jin Lee. What a haunting short story. She really is one of my favourite writers. Related thought: I’m going to do this thing of reading around an author (in this case, her) a la
.📖 Reading Keep Going by
(50% completed). Big fan of whatever this dude does. His book Show Your Work basically kickstarted this whole “document your process online” thing I’ve been doing ever since I was a reporter and sharing my interviews through LinkedIn.📝 Published my January log (so far). I had no idea I’ve finished reading three books (though two of them are “short”).
Book a call: Have a bite-sized creative project? Let’s give you a starting line boost a la Mario Kart - https://calendly.com/beckyisj/
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Such a great read, Becky!
I love the idea of MVC. What a delightful essay!