What is minimum viable audience (MVA) and why does it matter?

Minimum viable audience means you have enough people seeing your work to test whether it will sell. You can’t know if your art will sell without getting it in front of enough eyeballs. The loose definition is 250 people on an email list and 250 people on a social platform. Alternatively, if you do in-person shows, probably five to seven shows can serve as your minimum viable audience. The quality of the audience matters too - some people have 10,000 followers who aren’t actually interested in their art. But you need this baseline audience size before you can accurately test whether you have traction. Without it, you’re testing in a vacuum.

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Asked by synthesized from teaching · Answered by Patrick Shanahan and Nick Friend · art-marketing-podcast · 2022-02-12