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. Michael Dean 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: Rik and Jennifer Scott.

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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 Tommy Dixon.

• 📖 Reading Keep Going by Austin Kleon (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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