LinkedIn Post: No Hiding at the Table

Source: /opt/gcv-portfolio/captions/DSvN7GzlKlc.en.vtt — Little Five Points Halloween parade livestream, ~06:33–08:33

I spent part of Halloween at the Little Five Points parade this year, walking the street and talking to the vendors.

I talked to maybe ten of them. Filmmakers, arts and crafts people, the Deep South wrestling crew who used to run shows out of the old church down there. Nice to see them out on the street doing their thing.

And I kept thinking about the same thing the whole time. The toughest part of being a vendor isn't the setup or the weather or the long day. It's that your stuff is sitting right next to somebody else's stuff. Same table, same foot of space. There's nothing to hide behind. No marketing page, no algorithm to game. Your art's got to be great, or people walk two feet to the left and buy from the person next to you.

Most of those vendors have day jobs, by the way. They work a real job and vend at events on the side. Honestly, a good idea. You put your real work out on the street when you can, next to somebody else's, and let people decide.

I keep thinking about that because it's the test most of us spend a whole career dodging. We'd rather build a funnel, tune a profile, write a sharper bio than stand next to a competitor in the same physical space and let the work speak for itself.

The table doesn't care about your positioning. It just wants to know if the thing is any good.

If you're not sure your work would survive being set down next to somebody else's, that's worth sitting with before you spend another dollar on the packaging.

draft from corpus — based on Brandyn's Little Five Points Halloween parade livestream (DSvN7GzlKlc.en.vtt)