Some good business lessons in this article

[kane]

The article is a piece on movie director Kevin Smith and talks about how he has reinvented himself over the years. It's a good piece about him, but there are some good lessons here on adapting instead of dying.

How Kevin Smith Makes Big Business Out of Niche Audiences

[Barry-xlovecam]

If he couldn?t do that with mainstream movies, fuck it, he didn?t need ?em. He was wealthy enough as it was, and besides, he had a new medium for ripping open his chest, one then still in its infancy: podcasts. His longtime friend and collaborator Scott Mosier and he tried their hand at one in 2007, calling it The SModcast (S for Smith, M for Mosier), and were surprised at how big and devoted an audience it snagged. There was never much of a structure. It was just them hanging out, talking about topics such as whether or not the characters on Lost would masturbate on the island. (?Are you like, ?I?m going on a hike,? and it?s like a three-minute hike and you?re like, ?I?m back!??) It wasn?t for everyone, but then again, Smith was no longer interested in appealing to everyone. Indeed, this privately genial man who had once charmed Hollywood with his self-effacing humor started to develop a reputation as a crank. ?I do think that Kevin went through a midlife crisis,? his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, says of the turn of the decade, and he went through it in public.

That's really classic distributive theory -- identifying undeserved markets.

[bronco67]

I haven't read the article yet, but I will.

Even though I'm not a big Kevin Smith fan, I have been following what he's doing for the last few years. There's something to be said for "finding your tribe" and getting income from that core group who loves your work, as opposed to casting a wide net.

But this only applies to people who actually create things. A lot of people do not.