THE LEAFLET

February 27 2025

minimum viable audience, best pursuits, the mardi gras spirit

MINIMUM VIABLE AUDIENCE

In his latest book, This is Strategy, Seth Godin riffs on the minimum viable product concept from Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup. I like the riff and the deliberate refocus it asks of you. 

A minimum viable product is the cheapest, smallest, fastest version of the thing that can be useful to your people. Instead of spending lots of time and money to make something shiny, you make something that’s a little (or very) shabby. The point isn’t the shine; it’s the shipping. And the point of the shipping is to see what, if anything, your people do with the thing you’ve given them. That’s the information that you’re after. You use that information to shape what ships next. Maybe a whole different shabby thing. Maybe a shinier version of the original shabby thing.

There’s always a risk, though, that you fall a little bit in love with the thing and its features, even when it’s shabby. You lose sight of the customers and community you’re building for. You think your joke is so funny that they should laugh. You build a whole bit around that first joke and forget to tell it, to see if they actually do laugh. Or worse, you tell it, you bomb, and you ignore and explain away the bombing. They should laugh! It is funny!

With the minimum viable audience, your starting point isn’t the thing you’re making. It’s the people you’re making it for. Godin urges you to make something extraordinary for 10 people who share a similar need, something so good that they recommend it to their friends and coworkers without being asked to do that. Just 10. Don’t get wild and crazy chasing after your 1,000 true fans, yet.

-eric

Read the rest here.

PARENTING, GARDENING, PURSUIT

In some of the best pursuits, the reward you earn is more of the pursuit. It’s worthwhile to experiment with different pursuits to find one (maybe more than one, if you're curious and lucky) that meets this criterion. It’s also worthwhile to look at your current pursuits and ask yourself which of them is already of this kind but hiding from you inside the popular ideology of achievement. 

The mindset of a race - set distance, surrounding competitors, goal time - can blind you to the satisfaction of this kind of pursuit, satisfaction that may be available to you right now. A thought experiment: think ahead, beyond the current deadline or goal. Imagine you meet the goal. Now imagine a private moment that follows this goal. In that moment, you’re not basking in the recent achievement; you’re not anxiously anticipating the next achievement. You’re peacefully assigning yourself more of what you have just done. You’re grateful for this thing you get to do.   

Gardening has been a good teacher for me in this. Raising kids can be a great teacher in this. In both, when things go well, there is growth, there are seasons, there are thrilling thresholds. And. So long as you’re alive, the pursuit does not cease. Doing it well last season means you get another season. Cleaning your plate leads to second and third and four thousandth helpings. 

-eric

Read the rest here.

THE MARDI GRAS SPIRIT

Mardi Gras is my favorite time of year in my favorite place. I want more of the spirit of this in the rest of the year. I even want it at work. 

The “Christmas spirit” is a certain generosity and cheerfulness. Kind of quaint and snowbound and unchanging. Mardi Gras is different. It’s excessive; it’s fat (by name). It’s in rolling conversation with itself, which is to say that the people celebrating it are in conversation with the past, with the choices of people who celebrated it last year and in 2001 and 1967 and way before. When you see pictures of Mardi Gras in New Orleans from 50 years ago, you recognize it right away, almost without a sense of elapsed time. It has been weird and joyful and lascivious and friendly for a long time (although I won't gloss the fact that it was also for a very long time explicitly racist and segregated - it’s a human, American, Southern thing and it therefore has human, American, Southern history and violence in its story). 

Some of the best of it is seeing thousands of people suddenly turned into artists and actors. They make costumes at home and they become characters for the day. There’s the assertion of self (and selves) that comes with almost any art making I can think of. But there isn’t the self-consciousness of a writer’s workshop or a dance class. There is no teacher who holds a central place of authority and the posture of your peers is not one of critique. The stage you’re on is egalitarian. That stage only works if it’s populous. One person can be a performer. One person cannot be a parade. This is a day (and a season) of parades.

In the most exciting and effective places I have worked, this Mardi Gras spirit swirls through the same mundane structures everyone else seems stuck with (zoom calls, meetings, spreadsheets, socials etc etc). Teammates make use of (and make fun of) hierarchies and roles. Intersections are celebratory, not transactional. People create stuff and offer it up to others and they shimmy beyond what they’ve already mastered into what might be. They do this because a) they enjoy it and b) that’s what we do around here. And part of why they enjoy it is it’s what we do around here. 

Come do this with us. Take the streets on Tuesday. Make stuff, don’t be a jerk, let yourself be dazzled. The point isn’t looking good (although we do look good!) - it’s looking like you care more about being a part of it, contributing yourself to it, than looking good.

-eric

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on tattoos and grief:

I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity…It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.

Essayist Annie Dillard on days as gods as days:

No gods have power to save. There are only days. The one great god abandoned us to days, to time’s tumult of occasions, abandoned us to the gods of days each brute and amok in his hugeness and idiocy.

Teacher Seth Godin on product development:

The secret of successful product development isn’t an innovation that bursts forth as a polished and finished product. Instead, it’s sticking with something that is almost useless and nurturing, sharing, and improving it until we can’t imagine living without it. The goal at the start is traction with a few, not perfection for the masses.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric