You've Got a Violin, I've Got a Barn
Stop deliberating and put on the show tomorrow — you will learn more in five minutes than in five hours.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 93%
This is Lee's distillation of Jordan Weisman, the mentor who hired him at Microsoft and later co-founded companies with him. The input is any opportunity you are deliberating on; the mechanism is committing to a public attempt on a near date rather than completing the plan; the output is either the thing working or the fastest possible education about why it did not. Lee's confession is that if he had been in charge of their alternate reality company, they would have been paralysed and too scared to do anything.
Origin
Weisman drilled two lines into Lee at Microsoft's Xbox group: nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd, and you've got a violin, I've got a barn, let's put on a show. Lee says it took him forever to figure out but that Weisman really burned it into him, and that Weisman's willingness to call Steven Spielberg with no product and no idea what they were doing is what produced the world's first alternate reality game.
Core principles
- 01Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd — no amount of marketing effort substitutes for visible momentum.
- 02You have a violin, I have a barn, let's put on a show: the correct response to an opportunity is a date, not a plan.
- 03You will learn a great deal, you will fail, and both of those are fine — the only unacceptable outcome is not going.
- 04Five hours of thinking and five minutes of playtesting yield the same benefit, so the deliberation is pure cost.
- 05Speed comes from having nothing to lose; low expectations are an asset because they remove the case for overthinking.
- 06A phone call can create a business that does not exist yet, and the product can be built after the yes.
- 07This mindset is transmissible but slow to absorb — Lee says it took him forever to figure out and was burned into him by repetition.
How to run it
- 1
Identify what you are deliberating instead of testing
Name the decision that has been sitting in analysis. Tim's paraphrase from elsewhere is that you can think about it for five hours or playtest it for five minutes and get the same benefit, which Lee confirms as exactly it.
- 2
Convert the plan into a date
Weisman's instruction is not to overthink but to put on the show tomorrow. The commitment to a near-term public attempt is the mechanism.
Pro tip Announcing the date externally removes the option to keep deliberating.
- 3
Make the ask before you are ready
Weisman called Steven Spielberg and said his company could market Spielberg's game better than anybody else in the world and he should hire them. They had no product and no idea what they were doing, and Spielberg said yes.
Pro tip Only promise things you could plausibly learn to do; the point is compressing the sequence, not lying.
Watch out This works when you have real capability behind an unfinished offer, not when you have neither.
- 4
Accept failure as a legitimate outcome
Weisman's framing includes it explicitly: just go, you will learn a lot and that is fine, and you will fail and that is fine too.
Pro tip Lee's team moved fast on Kickstarter precisely because they had nothing to lose and did not think it would be a huge success.
- 5
Watch for a crowd and feed it
The complementary Weisman rule is that nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. Once momentum appears, the story of the momentum becomes the marketing.
Pro tip Exploding Kittens' Amazon launch produced twenty thousand orders in the first hour because the Kickstarter story had made the product famous and unobtainable.
Watch out A crowd that forms and is not fed dissipates as fast as it gathered.
In the wild
Lee describes starting the alternate reality company with Jordan Weisman and admits that if he had been in charge they would have been paralysed and too scared to do anything. Weisman instead called Steven Spielberg, told him they could market his game better than anybody in the world and that he should hire them. They had no product and no idea what they were doing. Spielberg's studio hired them, and Spielberg himself walked into Lee's Microsoft office one day to explain what the film AI was about, because Weisman had simply told him to go talk to that guy.
→ The Beast, the world's first alternate reality game, and a Peabody Award.
Lee met Matt Inman, creator of The Oatmeal, through a mutual friend, pitched him the game, and launched the Kickstarter campaign roughly three weeks later. Lee's own explanation is that they built it fast because they had nothing to lose — they did not think it would be a huge success, it simply felt good, and they decided not to overthink it and just go.
→ A campaign funded in about seven minutes and almost nine million dollars raised over thirty days.
After a year of work, the four Xbox games built around AI had to be cancelled because the film's ending was devastating and nobody was leaving that cinema wanting to play a video game. Lee sat heartbroken with Weisman in a Seattle sushi restaurant saying there had to be some way to release the narrative glue that Sean Stewart had written. Weisman's phone rang, and he looked at Lee and said: what if that was the story calling us right now.
→ The team cut the story into a million pieces, hid them across the real world, and made the film's launch the finale — creating The Beast.
Common mistakes
Waiting until you have a product to make the ask
Lee's admission is that a careful operator in his position would have waited and consequently never made the call. The Spielberg deal existed because the pitch preceded the product, not despite it.
Substituting thought for a test
Five hours of deliberation buys the same information as five minutes of playtesting. Every hour beyond the first real test is spent buying knowledge you could already have had.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and creators who are capable but paralysed, especially those working with an experienced partner who is not.
Not ideal for
High-consequence, irreversible decisions — regulatory, safety-critical or capital-destroying — where a fast failed attempt is not survivable.
From the transcript
“nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd and yeah try as hard as you want to market something get a crowd that's what actually matters”
“you've got a violin i've got a barn let's put on a show right like don't overthink this just go just like tomorrow put on…”
“we built it fast cuz we had nothing to lose we we didn't think it would be a huge success we just thought this feels…”
From the episode
#653: Elan Lee, Co-Creator of Exploding Kittens — How to Raise Millions on Kickstarter, Deconstructing Mega-Successes, Secrets of Game Design, The Power of Positive Constraints, The Delights of Craftsmanship, and The Art of Turning Fans into Superfans