Sterling Proffer

Nobody deserves support, public or otherwise, for making something no one wants. Artists, in that respect, are not any different from people who open restaurants or shops, many of which also fail. Being an artist is not a job. In economic terms, it is a business.

Adjacent User Theory demands an entirely different approach to being ‘user centric’. Static personas are OUT. Dynamic evolving personas that incorporate product adoption behavior are the standard to strive for. Every 3-6 months during hyper growth, you have to reorient your team around the next adjacent user, what they care about, and what problems... See more

Identify the set of things that you love to do and that you do well. You don’t need to be the best in the world at something. People often succeed because they have a set of various skills that don’t normally go together.

Great art, even good art, relies on the existence of individuals who are able to devote the lion’s share of their energy to producing it—in other words, professionals.

To understand your adjacent users, it is helpful to understand the attributes of who is successful today and why they are successful. The reason this is helpful is that your adjacent user is different on one or more of these attributes (but not all). These attributes create vectors of expansion.

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.”