There’s an interesting story behind making DDLJ (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge). For the unaware, it’s an extremely successful Bollywood film with the longest theatrical run in history. I always considered it to be the epitome of clichéd Bollywood—a lazy, formulaic crowd-pleaser. I am not being harsh here. Aditya Chopra, the director himself, admits:
My film is not different. I’m making the most commercial, clichéd, tapori (pedestrian) movie. I’m making the oldest story in the world.
DDLJ is an ordinary bollywood movie, but its success was no accident. It was born from nearly a decade of research—hard, deliberate work to understand the Indian audience
He (Aditya Chopra) saw every movie in the theatre FDFS (First Day, First Show) since he was 12 - just to study almost clinically what the audience thought, where they laughed, where they left. He tracked the BO numbers. He did the analysis, put in the hard work, and studied the business of cinema quite literally. He used those insights to inform his filmmaking process and predict what’s next. He understands the psychology of people in general, of Indian people very deeply, and what connects with them and what doesn’t.
This method is a far cry from the creative projects I’ve always admired—the “Don’t care about the audience” or “Ship something you want to see” kind of projects. The movies, shows, and video games I have admired have all been driven by a wild, passionate vision to make something great, not how the audience is going to react.
Aditya flipped this approach on its head. Well before committing to a project, he wanted to understand what makes the Indian audience tick. Make no mistake, he was still creative—the locations, dialogues, songs were all well-thought. However, he worked within the bounds of what he believed would eventually succeed.
Caring About Something That Works
Rick Rubin is a big advocate of letting your creative spirit do the work. You care and everything else will fall in place. In his book The Creative Act, he says:
In terms of priority, inspiration comes first. You come next. The audience comes last.
All that matters is that you are making something you love, to the best of your ability, here and now.
It’s a beautiful idea. But here’s the problem. Sooner or later, you need to create something the audience cares about. That’s because, without their validation, you’ll struggle to make money and sustain what you love.
Sure, you can ignore the audience and create only for yourself. There are enough success stories to make free-spirited creativity sound like a tempting idea. However, there are just as many failures. The basic fact can’t be ignored: to have a shot at making money, you need to build something people are willing to pay for. You need to care about the audience.
The other approach is to figure out what is working in the market, and create something with that in mind. The most successful indie-hackers I’ve seen do this very well. LevelsIO, for example, has been pretty amazing in spotting trends and building something valuable around them. When Generative AI was just taking off, he created Interior.ai and it quickly succeeded in becoming a $50k MRR side project.
Danny Postma entire approach to product-building centers around researching what people are already searching for via SEO tools, selecting the ones with money-making potential, then slowly building your website to rank well for those keywords.
Of course, you still need creativity. It’s not easy to sell junk. But by focusing your creativity on something with a better chance of success—something people already want—you can drastically improve your odds at making money. You treat creativity as a tool, not the goal.