Matt D’Avella’s Design Process
The world has changed a lot in recent years, and nowadays, nobody can deny that being a content creator on the internet is an actual business. One of the fastest-growing content creators on YouTube is Matt D’Avella, who is a life coach and the director of the award-winning movie Minimalism. He is a minimalist who advises how to live more meaningful lives instead of endlessly pursuing more expensive things that you don’t need. However, I want to concentrate on another aspect of his videos — designing good content which engages audiences and drives views. Then I will generalize the ideas to Design Thinking processes in other areas.
One of the most captivating things he does is to create stories around his experiences. In one of his videos, he talks about his early fascination with alternate film endings. He would go to the store and purchase the more expensive DVD to experience that “could have been” aspect of the film. He then says that filmmaking is alternate everything — alternate beginnings, conflicts, resolutions. As creators, we face these choices every day. When seeing a product, it seems like it was designed to be “perfect” from day 1. However, what we don’t see is the struggle behind the curtains when trying to create the product. These choices create a dilemma — when do you stop? And his advice is to stop as early as possible. Being a perfectionist is a massive deterrent for creativity. Making a product that’s 60% to “perfection” might take a day, moving it to 90% will take a week, but more than that will require months, if not years. If you decide to choose that route, one of 2 things will happen. Either you will lose the release window, or you will regret not making it even better by taking “a bit more time”. This is precisely why it’s better to get a functional, but minimal product out there as soon as possible, and iterate on the problems after getting feedback.
However, there is another extreme. Putting it out there as early as possible does not mean creating content with lousy quality. Again talking about content creation, Matt recommends taking time and making good content once in a while. This is a preferred alternative to publishing mediocre content every day or going the perfectionist route and putting out fantastic content every other year. We can see this happening outside the content creation world every day. Facebook doesn’t wait for years until coming up with a new feature that will “revolutionize” their product entirely. Instead, they add little things over time which make a small difference — like stories, sticker packs, and video calling effects. The same goes for Apple. They create iPhones once a year for a reason — to be able to make at least a few non-minor changes. Let’s be honest — iPhones haven’t changed much for the past few years. Nonetheless, people still wait for the new release and buy it because of the balance between timing and quality. At the end of the day, after making consistent good content, it’s not about the content anymore — it’s about you. People won’t evaluate every title of a video and every name of a new product — they will trust you. As long as you keep the quality, people will invest more time and more money. But to keep up a high level of content creation, Matt recommends prioritizing. In his words, “If you try to do everything, you will fail at everything.” I got the same advice countless times from serial entrepreneurs. They don’t like keeping people around them who have many startups. It’s essential to invest in what you love and be engaged by your job — not just fill in a long but meaningless portfolio.
Last but not least, Matt talks about simplicity. A piece of advice given by a guest on his podcast — Hope Leigh, was to create content that is simple to grasp. Again generalizing this to product creation and my own experience: people design sophisticated startups and try to pitch them as if others know about them as much as they do. It’s important to remember that nobody researched, thought, and cared about your product as much as you did. If, after a half an hour pitch or YouTube video, people are still confused about what you do — deeply rethink your life choices.
To sum up, keeping consistent high quality while maintaining simplicity in the delivery of it is a tested way to get results. This works both in the content creation world of YouTube and other social media, and the brutal world of startups.
