This is my tribute to the “Make the Logo Bigger” song [mp3] that has been traversing the blogosphere for months now. I just bumped into it again at the Refresh Phoenix Google Group, and somehow I felt inspired to Crappy Graph it.
On July 1st, I started producing daily videos.
I have wanted to get into video production for over a year now, but ended up with equipment collecting dust. The problem was that there is such a high barrier to entry with video production. It takes a huge time investment to get started (and the quality of the outcome will probably still be far from impressive) while the return on the investment (viewers) is not very appealing. Your first episodes will be difficult to produce, and barely anyone will end up watching it. Ouch.
This is a harsh realization you run into when starting out.
Instead of trying to leap in and produce a full-blown internet show, I have decided to create personal daily videos. This way, I can get more proficient at coming up with content, with editing video, and as a personal video, I don’t have to worry about rapidly growing my audience. This casual approach lowers the barrier to entry quite a bit, but still requires quite a bit of time investment.
Producing a new video every day has still been quite a challenge!
In this graph, I illustrate how time and experience can affect your video production time as well as the growth of your audience. If the solid lines were even with the dotted lines, then video production would not have such a daunting barrier to entry.
I would love to post several Crappy Graphs a week, but that’s not always possible. When I am feeling overworked and have less time to think creatively, I end up drawing blanks when I have 5 minutes to draw a graph.
The inability to create new graphs is not due to the lack of time, but instead due to the lack of creative energy. If you want to kill inspiration, simply overwork yourself.
Of course you have!
Today, I’m talking (and graphing) about a specific genre of absurd question — the type that is looking for a quantitative response. I noticed a trend, recently, that the more absurd the question is, the less accurate the answer will be.
Case in point: A common absurd question asked by clients is “How long will it take to find and fix all of the bugs in the application?” Obviously, most bugs are unforeseen (or else they wouldn’t be there!!) and thus impossible to accurately estimate. This type of absurd question, if answered at all, will usually yield a very inaccurate answer.
Crappy RSS!