What is the Minimum Viable Product for a startup photographer?
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Is "My art isn't good enough!" holding you back from launching?
Then you're trying too hard to produce 'visionary' art where 'salable' art will do.
Perfection is always the greatest enemy of done.
And your market isn't waiting for you to be perfect - they're waiting for you to be done.
Done worrying.
Done being scared.
Done thinking and reading and dreaming instead of launching, serving, and delighting.
The Number 1 reason PTPs get stuck pre-launch is the inability to recognize the value of their work.
But "good enough" art is impossible to articulate. You can't measure "good enough" when it comes to the subjective.
Releasing your Minimum Viable Product to the world is the best cure to getting unstuck as a perfectionist - it is the simplest, most affordable, most focused version of your offering. The first draft. Version 1.0.
And launching enables iteration: you're then able to listen, and evolve the value you create based on market feedback.
Where we artists get this all wrong is in the chronology: we desperately want to perfect everything about our art, marketing and business before we open our doors. We want to control every aspect, every pixel, every impression. We fear rejection, being laughed at, being found out as 'impostors.'
Which is why you're reading this post - so long as you're stuck pre-launch, you're just staring at the mountain of success out your window; you're not actually making any progress.
Perfectionism pre-launch leads to:
- Bloated up-front investment: More equipment you don't need, more classes you don't need yet, more books you aren't going to read (and if you do, you aren't going to act on), more Photoshop actions and tutorials you sure as heck don't need, and endless other ways to waste your time and money.
- Longer lead time before launch: General George S. Patton said that a good plan, violently executed today, is far and away better than the perfect plan tomorrow. You can't gain traction, build a reputation, grow your circle, gain clients or earn dollars until you get your art and message out into the world.
- Feature creep: "But I need this idea! And that idea! And what about this product? Or that pricing strategy! And I've got to get these studio samples first, Soandso Photoguru said so! Oh just let me watch a few more classes on CreativeLive first, then I'll figure out what to do..."
- Delaying 'first to market' release: While you're procrastinating, your competition is hustling. The longer you wait, the more saturated the market becomes, making it all the harder to define and communicate your unique value proposition.
- Investing in unwanted features: The longer you drag out the pre-launch stage, the more likely you'll overthink what the market wants or needs. Don't invest time and money into features the market never cared about in the first place, like the $8,000 I poured into a retail studio space only to find out my clients much prefer the location shoots I was already doing.
What's the Minimum Viable Product for a PTP?
Let's term it Salable Art.
Odds are, if you're reading this, your art is well beyond the minimum threshold of 'salable.' You may not think so, but consider two of the most basic, formulaic, uncreative, yet successful models in the photography industry: chain studios and school photography.
Most chain studios found in shopping centers and malls give you a pose book - a kind of menu for your photo session. You might have a few dozen poses to choose from, or just a handful. Depending on your investment, you'll walk away with a stack of prints all of the same pose, or if you pay the big bucks, you'll get some variety - even if that variety looks like everyone else who walks into that studio.
Whatever pose(s) you choose, your photographer will roll the camera cart or pull the camera-on-a-boom into place, copycat the posing from the menu, and snap one or two shots. You may get a choice of three or so backgrounds. Muslin FTW!
You then sit at the sales station together, blow your budget, and walk away with the exact same portraits as thousands of people before you.
Average sale per client for a chain studio? I can't find any real data, but anecdotally I am told between $200 and $500, with big sales reaching well past $1,000.
An old high school friend told me she gladly paid $1,400 at a chain studio for portraits of her and her three kids.
I gave her my prices. She gaped. "Oh my gosh. I wish I had known that before!"
And these kinds of sales are coming out of chain studios offering packages starting at $19.95.
Their business model is rock solid for what they do and how they do it. Guaranteed, they wouldn't be occupying high-value, high-traffic rentals like in the La Cantera luxury mall in San Antonio if they weren't consistently profitable.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not picking on chain studios, nor am I demeaning their work. They are creating and communicating value, which is what every professional photographer, craftsman and small business owner should strive for.
But you've got to see the potential success beyond your hang-ups about your own art.
Can you create art, either today or with a measure of purposeful practice, that compares favorably to the chain studio's offering of eight or so mix-and-match poses and scenes? Absolutely.
Can you craft an awesome customer experience that far exceeds that offered by the formula-driven chain studios? Doubtless.
$1,000 An Hour
Let's study another model of formula-driven photography: school portraiture.
School photographers are beasts: 15-second photo shoots? Check. Guaranteed profit on every photo they take? Check. Some averaging over $1,000 an hour in sales? Double check.
As my father and Mark Ronson would say: "Hot damn!"
Alongside chain studio portraits, creativity and innovation have almost no place in school portraiture. The goal is to herd as many kids past the camera as fast as possible while collecting parents' two- and three-digit checks for hours on end, days at a time, week after week throughout the school year.
Even more so than chain studios, it's volume work - you make your numbers on speed, efficiency, low Cost of Goods Sold, and low overhead.
In case you didn't hear me: Over $1,000 an hour for formulaic 15-second photo shoots with art that has barely evolved in 40 years.
Can you make better art? Yes.
Can you create a better customer experience? Hell yes.
Humble art for humble pay.
Salable art.
That's where you're aiming to launch as a startup photographer.
If you let it, perfectionism will kill your dream.
Minimum Viable Product In Action
So in the wild, is the MVP for a part time photographer...
- A 20-image portfolio?
- Business cards and a Facebook page?
- An old Canon 40D and a Nifty Fifty 50/1.8 lens?
- A nifty logo?
- A half dozen print product options to offer?
- An ad in the high school football program?
- A magnet billboard on the side of your car?
- A uniform?
- A custom-embroidered camera strap with your business name on it?
Yes.
And no.
I can't say.
There are thousands of stories of photographers launching their business with less than you have right now.
I started with a Fuji Finepix 1.3 megapixel camera and a byline in the local newspaper's sports section.
The only thing you truly need is consistency.
You must be able to reproduce for a potential client some approximation of the art you show them via your marketing.
Consistency.
That's it.
That's all you need to launch with your Minimum Viable Product.
If you're not where you need to be in your art to consistently reproduce the images in your portfolio, then build yourself a curriculum and timeline to learn that consistency.
Build it from good books, good blogs, and good courses.
You're not going to just wake up one day a talented, consistent, valuable artist.
You have to Do The Work.
And what gets scheduled gets done.
Set a goal to consistently produce a salable series of images from every photo shoot. Block the time on your calendar to study and practice and get yourself where you want to be.
Your images don't have to be the most visionary, creative, unique works of art your market has ever seen - they just need to be as good as or a shade better than the formulaic chain studios or hyperspeed school photogs. Not in technical quality (those studios do make nice, sharp images), but in creativity, location and scene, personality, and the experience you craft for your clients.
Create value, and communicate that value
The more make excuses pre-launch waiting for the mythical "right time", the more likely you'll psych yourself out of launching at all.
Your art and the people waiting to be blessed by it deserve better.
"Because one does not want to be disturbed, to be made uncertain, he establishes a pattern of conduct, of thought, a pattern of relationship to man. Then he becomes a slave to the pattern and takes the pattern to be the real thing." - Bruce Lee
Next Steps
- Time's Up: If I held a gun to your head and said "Launch today or die!", what would you do in the next four hours? Make a list. Break the list into baby steps. Now pull up your calendar, and within the next seven days, block off four hours. Do The Work. You don't have to actually launch - that decision is always yours to make - but I bet this exercise will jar you into a much better idea of what your own Minimum Viable Product looks like.
- Brainstorm Session: Get out your pen and paper. Less is more. As Saint-Exupery writes, perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. If you stripped your art and business down to the absolute core value - the 80/20 rule applied to your art, the experience you craft for clients, and the ideal clients you seek to serve - what would that look like? Does that simplicity make it easier to envision who your ideal clients are, and how you would market yourself to them?
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