What we mean by taste
Taste gets treated like weather. Something you either have or you don't, impossible to argue with, gone the second you try to explain it. We think that's mostly an excuse. If taste can't be described it can't be taught, and if it can't be taught, a studio is just one person's instinct with a company's name on it.
So here's our working definition. Taste is the speed at which you recognize what matters. Not what you like, what matters: the one detail in a hundred that the whole thing turns on. A good editor finds it in a sentence. A good founder finds it in a market. The skill is the same, and it's trainable, which is the part most people would rather not admit.
So here's our working definition. Taste is the speed at which you recognize what matters. Not what you like, what matters: the one detail in a hundred that the whole thing turns on. A good editor finds it in a sentence. A good founder finds it in a market. The skill is the same, and it's trainable, which is the part most people would rather not admit.
We train it the way you train anything. You make the call out loud, then you watch what happens. Every launch is a wager about what mattered, and most of building is just keeping score honestly: this detail carried the product, that one we agonized over and nobody noticed. Do that for ten years across enough companies and the recognition gets faster. That compounding is the only real moat a studio has.
We train it the way you train anything. You make the call out loud, then you watch what happens. Every launch is a wager about what mattered, and most of building is just keeping score honestly: this detail carried the product, that one we agonized over and nobody noticed. Do that for ten years across enough companies and the recognition gets faster. That compounding is the only real moat a studio has.
Sunspell builds companies from our offices in New York. Usually four at once