Sterling Proffer

You need to force the team to be the adjacent user by experiencing the product in the conditions and settings that the adjacent user is experiencing. This is commonly referred to as dog-fooding. This starts by making sure the team is constantly experiencing new user flows, empty states, and product states that require a certain amount of usage... See more

6. Play with the building blocks of music: As creators of the “building blocks” of music, music producers are the perfect audience to explore the composability of NFTs. Areas like credit splits, sampling, remixing, beat libraries, engineer and producer DAOs and so on are all waiting for web3 innovators to tackle.

What artists really need, writes Amy Whitaker in Art Thinking, “is not to be paid to make the things they already know how to make, but to somehow find space inside their financials to play and take risks to develop the next thing.”

Until you recognize that they are adjacent users and commit to helping them, they will remain adjacent. They aren’t going to get there on their own. You have to be passionate about them and learn to view the product from their eyes. If you don’t focus on them, growth slows and your cohorts decay.

If tiktok makes the music world look and act more banal, it also, in some cases, makes it sound that way too. One fad is songs that take kindergarten-friendly gimmicks—a countdown, a sound effect—and add adult profanity, making for a cocktail of relatability.