Designing MVPs with your content

Every creator online follows a certain path, but I bet most don’t know what decides it.

It is how often humans pick up their phones 📱 On average, we do that 58 times a day 😲🤯

70% of these sessions (40 times) are less than two minutes long. Every creator starts in one of these scroll-and-you-miss sessions.

Just imagine. It’s a crowded marketplace where you’ve set up your stall. And your patron is zipping through💨 There are many others like you, around you, hoping to catch her passing attention. You must make yourself heard in one shot. Most don’t make it past this. We all know this feeling. 🤦‍♂️

But something happens. She hears your pitch, she pauses. She takes a step closer. Her curiosity is piqued. But she has things to do.

Next week, and assuming you’re there too, she passes by again. This time she stops. She comes over. She lets you do your spiel without having you breathless. She smiles, something has clicked. If you’re lucky, she sticks around for a few minutes. This happens not more than a quarter of the time.

A few such visits and hopefully you’ve won her trust. She knows you now, believes in you. In fact, she visits the marketplace just for you. This is rare. This happens less than 5% of the time.

This is the math every creator has to come to terms with:

58 screen-trips a day
40 less than two min long
15 between two and ten min long
3 more than ten min long

And you’re not the only creator in digital town and yours is not the only marketplace. 🤷‍♂️

Moral of the story? You don’t have a lifetime to make your point. So make it quick. This is what a mentor of mine wrote to me when I asked him about how to make my curiosity matter to the world:

‘Design your hook as a Minimum Viable Pitch. Let it be the 30-sec read that gets people to give you 5–10 minutes the next time. Can every post you write begin with the 30-sec pitch? Then use your MVPs to funnel people to your larger ideas’.