In artistic and creative endeavours, there is often a compromise to be made between popularity and merit.

If you want to be popular, you’ll end up serving the common denominator and compromising on complexity and nuance. Or worse, you may end up chasing after your audience with platitudes and cliches. If you want to be liked by critics or experts, you’ll likely end up with overly-complicated ideas that are borderline insane1 because the expert audience has been over-exposed to the topic. 2

Neither end of the spectrum seems worth chasing, so who should we aim to please? The correct answer is ourselves, but are there others worth serving?

I think it’s a trap to try and become popular: we end up evaluating our self worth based on the opinion of people who don’t know about what we are making. This is a sure way to disappointment. I think it’s just as fruitless to build for experts and critics: they don’t particularly have a need for what we are doing since they can make it themselves.

That is to say: I think the most fulfilling audience to build for is the under-served audience3: people who don’t have others building for them. They tend to appreciate the work the most and even bring great ideas to the table - setting up future collaboration and letting you know what they want more of.

Notes

  1. Ever notice how hard it is to watch “good” movies or listen to “good” music? good things often tend to be hard to consume because of how complex and full of nuance they are or because they are trying to move things in a new direction

  2. And if you do create something beautiful, novel and unique - will it inspire or will it create jealousy?

  3. I try not to give practical advice, but I may have done so inadvertently here