Let’s talk about everyone’s favorite topic…
Failure.
Did you know that there is a ‘good’ way to fail, and a ‘bad’ way to fail?
This distinction is a very cool concept we picked up in business, that magicians would hugely benefit from if they incorporated it into their magic.
The philosophy is pretty simple.
- If the fundamental premise of your product is flawed, it will fail whether or not it’s ‘ready’ to be released
- If the fundamental premise of your product is strong, it will work whether or not it’s ready
Therefore…
- You should aim to get your product out there as soon as possible—even if it’s not ‘ready.’ If the product is flawed, it will fail—but at least you know that now rather than after years of development and refining. If it’s a strong idea, you’ll be able to tell.
This is the GOOD way to fail.
Fail fast.
In our books, this works equally well for magic.
If the fundamental premise of an effect is flawed, it doesn’t matter how many weeks you spend dressing it up with patter and performance. It’s better to just get it out there and see what happens.
If it’s going to fail—make sure it fails FAST.
On the other hand, if the premise of the effect is solid, you’ll be able to tell—and you’ll know now that it’s worth spending the time to invest in the presentation and refinement stage.
This ‘fail fast’ concept in business can be seen in the quote below:
‘If you’re not embarrassed by version 1 of your product, you launched it too late.’
We’d adapt that to ‘if you’re not embarrassed by version 1 of your effect, you started testing it on audiences too late.’
This is an idea that might seem alien to a lot of magicians. We’ve found that artistic types find it harder to wrap their head around the concept—they always want things to be perfect the first time.
But failing fast is so much better than failing slow.
The whole process is a simple iteration:
- Put stuff out there
- Gauge the reaction
- Edit the stuff you put out there
- Gauge the new reaction
- repeat
This process works for both magic and marketing.
Here’s an example of failing fast from our own business…
When we initially created The Daily Magician tapes, they were $3.
Then, after we added a few interviews, we changed the price to $19.95.
We could have spent a lot of time discussing this, doing market research, and drawing tables with fancy charts.
But instead, we had the idea, and changed the price the same day.
The results?
Some people still bought, but we made less sales.
Since each individual sale was worth more, the maths somewhat worked out.
Soon though, the sales we were making from it slowed down—and we realised something:
Changing the price to $19.95 went against the whole point of the tapes—giving as many magicians as we could access to XYZ.
This was when we had our breakthrough…
We set the minimum to $0.50, and put in place a ‘pay what you want’ policy.
What happened next was incredible…
The tapes started selling like crazy. Many magicians—who otherwise may not have been able to afford them—were able to listen to these interviews.
Many people paid just the base $0.50—which was fine by us.
But some people turned out to be very generous in the price they picked.
In fact, it started to seem like we were making MORE money selling these tapes than the $19.95 versions—and that was just a cool ‘side effect’ of our real goal, which was getting these tapes in the hands of as many magicians as possible.
If you didn’t already know, as part of the Inner Circle, you get our Daily Magician Tapes for FREE, listen to them here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/2/folders/1HSygt8B2GX-eXDxjSmO2TDvQd31H02sp
Enjoy,
Jacob and Benji.