1000 True Fans? Try 100

1. The article shows a pyramid and it&#x27;s important. In order to get a few &quot;true fans&quot; (people prepared to pay dearly for what you produce), you need a large amount of &quot;distant fans&quot; (people who like what you do, as long as it&#x27;s free). The key word is <i>conversion</i>, and, regrettably, it&#x27;s not present once in the post [0]. It&#x27;s probably in the 1 to 0.1% range.<p>[0] Edit: In fact it is (convert). However in the next paragraph the concept is somehow replaced with &quot;whaling&quot;, which means that a few paying customers help support a large group of free riders, or conversion in reverse. This is misleading. The large group needs to be there first.<p>2. At the $1000&#x2F;year price point, it&#x27;s not an artistic production anymore. Most examples are about &quot;courses&quot;, about teaching something to a specific audience. Some of the topics are questionable and sound a little scammy (physiotherapy?), may be preying on people&#x27;s vulnerabilities (private coding classes for kids?) or playing on vanity (having a celebrity streamer play along with you). This is Goop territory. Is this the future we want?

IIRC the 1k true fans idea was walked back by its original author after they got feedback from industry folks describing how the model was basically impossible to implement in the real world.<p>This holds 100% true to my experience in influencer marketing and esports. Monetizing fans is <i>really hard</i> on passion alone. You need to create valuable calls to action and continuously produce content in order to maintain their attention. Once you &#x27;lose&#x27; a fan (which only means losing their emotional focus, even temporarily) you often can&#x27;t monetize them <i>at all</i> without significant re-activation effort. [0]Demonstrating this, large influencers lose <i>extraordinary</i> sums of money if they stop producing content for short windows of time.<p>This is why using influencers in marketing requires genuine strategy, and is the likely culprit behind so much &#x27;hate&#x27; for influencer marketing.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dexerto.com&#x2F;entertainment&#x2F;ninja-reveals-shocking-number-of-subscribers-he-lost-by-missing-two-days-of-streaming-100449" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dexerto.com&#x2F;entertainment&#x2F;ninja-reveals-shocking...</a>

I&#x27;m having trouble envisioning very many markets where a &quot;fan&quot; is going to consistently spend $1k&#x2F;year.<p>The article mentions professional training and education, which makes sense.<p>I can also see certain people spending that kind of money on physical goods (mechanical keyboards, audiophile equipment, one-of-a-kind art pieces) but $1k of <i>revenue</i> from physical goods is very different from $1k of <i>income</i>.<p>Other than that, the only things I can think of would be direct access to a celebrity or some form of conspicuous consumption. (&quot;That game you play all day? I personally cover 40% of its operating costs.&quot;)<p>I don&#x27;t see how the average webcomic artist or food blogger can achieve anything like what is described here.

Who in the hell is going to pay another individual $1000 a year to make content? That&#x27;s more than a year&#x27;s subscriptions to Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Netflix!<p>One of the root ideas in the True Fans essay was a fan would be willing to spend a day&#x27;s wage for a year&#x27;s worth of content from a creator. A large portion of the population at large <i>can</i> pay a day&#x27;s wage for say 52 hours (a creator spitting out and hour of content a week) of entertainment. Out of that population, argues the essay, a creator needs to only find a thousand True Fans out of the population that <i>can</i> afford the $100 in order to make a living.<p>That&#x27;s not only workable math but something that&#x27;s doable. The market can support the model, it won&#x27;t always and in every situation but it can. At the reasonable &quot;day&#x27;s wage&quot; level many people can afford to support multiple creators. Spending $200 a year for content is still in the affordability range of a large portion of the populace.<p>A far far smaller portion of the population at large <i>can</i> afford $1k for 52 hours of entertainment. It&#x27;s definitely not a tenth of the $100 population, it&#x27;s more likely a fraction of a percent. So any given creator isn&#x27;t likely to find 100 True <i>Rich</i> Fans, they&#x27;re going to find maybe one if they&#x27;re lucky. The market isn&#x27;t going to support a model where a few dozen hours of entertainment costs a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars will get you a game console, a TV, subscriptions to a bunch of streaming services, and a ton of games. Even fewer of these whales could support multiple creators so very few creators could ever possibly survive of the whale model.

Guys what if... You had 200 fans each paying 500 a year?<p>Amazing right? 500 is less than 1000 and 200 isn’t that much more than 100.<p>Feel free to take down the OP and put this comment up instead

The problem with the &quot;passion economy&quot;, which was alluded to in another comment, is that it strengthens the already too-prevalent assumption that everything can and should be monetizable. Markets are useful but they don&#x27;t need to be involved in every aspect of existence.<p>Sure, you don’t need to participate in Patreon to make stuff, but the trend seems to be toward relying on consumer market forces to fund culture. Tying the livelihoods of creators to the approval of their fans will lead them to censor themselves and consequently you aren&#x27;t going to get anything that really pisses people off or challenges them in a countercultural way, at least enough to stop buying your stuff.<p>The idea of basic income seems like a better path forward, in terms of preserving artistic integrity (i.e. not &quot;make money&quot; or &quot;please your fans&quot; as the motive for making things). Everyone will get enough money to survive, no matter how much your ideas go against the zeitgeist.

I think there&#x27;s a bit of confusion here in the way the author frames these 100 people. At this level they are not fans. They&#x27;re not supporting you out of some sort of emotional attachment. They are giving you $1000 a year because they believe that the service or product you provide is worth that much. They&#x27;re customers and that&#x27;s all.<p>The &quot;whale&quot; archetype is just a modern version of what has always existed with MLM and self-help gurus where they pray on rich and emotionally vulnerable people. It&#x27;s an absolutely tiny group of people that will never translate to a widespread economy.<p>Conflating the 1000 true fans concept with this is a mistake in my opinion.

&gt; On Patreon, the average initial pledge amount has increased 22 percent over the past two years.<p>22% is not the same as 10,000%. Nowhere near it.<p>&gt; Since 2017, the share of new patrons paying more than $100 per month—or $1,200 per year—has grown 21 percent.<p>Is this a statistics fail? My bet is that this is either $100 over all subscriptions (I pay about $30&#x2F;mo for 7 or 8 creators on patreon, most in the $1 to $5 range), or the <i>increase</i> is from a number previously so small as to be almost inconsequential, meaning it&#x27;s still almost inconsequential.<p>Twitch, on the other hand, I can believe. There&#x27;s a much more immediate feedback loop there, and creators responding to your pledges directly.

The 1000 fans concept is mostly about gratitude - &#x27;thanks, keep doing what you&#x27;re doing&#x27;.<p>The 100 fans idea seems to be mostly about expectation - &#x27;I gave you money, now deliver this&#x27;.<p>The article describes customers not fans. The <i>VC&#x27;ing</i> of 1000 true fans.<p>Nevertheless it&#x27;s great to see an Internet where growing numbers of people are willing to pay individuals for value and have the means to do so.

The fewer <i>&quot;fans&quot;</i> you have and the more they pay the more power they will have over you and the more demanding they will become. In other words: Your fans turn into patrons and will have a major influence on your work.<p>Also their demand might drive you in a corner you may not be able to easily escape. As with everything, focus is good but too much focus can be a risk as well.

&gt; As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love.<p>As a sentence this just fills me with dread. And it&#x27;s hard to say why because I know, for example, that a writer making a living from selling their books could be said to be &quot;monetizing what they love&quot; OR engaging in the &quot;Passion Economy&quot;.<p>But if I was to try and get to the heart of it it&#x27;s simply that I don&#x27;t want to monetize what I love. I want it to be the one part of my existence not dominated by money. And I don&#x27;t want an actual passion (awful word really) to form part of an economy.

The &quot;passion economy&quot; is flooding the Internet with low SNR material and making it harder and harder to get to high quality information.<p>Creators create not to meet some sort of quota or &quot;monetize&quot; but because they need to create. It&#x27;s the same for artists. True art exists because it has to come out no matter what. Monetization doesn&#x27;t come into it at all. This is an important point that the passion economy vultures don&#x27;t seem to grasp. What we see today is monetization becoming THE purpose and overriding everything else.

I call bullshit on this &#x27;passion economy&#x27; thing. Masses of people never in history could make a living from what they love, and unfortunatelly there is no sign that it will happen now. Musicans, writers, indie-game creators: most of them do their passion besides a day-job. Long-tail never made much money and with globalisation it is worse than ever. The unfortunate truth is the opposite: not only long tail does not really work, but as Peter Thiel said: money is in monopolies. Non-monopolies &#x27;compete-away&#x27; the profit.<p>As a developer, you are better off to go work for a monopoly: they pay well. (Google, Facebook, etc).<p>(This does not mean I do not have a passion project (&#x27;indie game&#x27;), I just know that the chance that it can replace my day-job is quite low.)

While this is well written, I would urge people to NOT to follow this advice. Subscriber churn is a real thing and losing $1000&#x2F;yr subscriber hurts way more than losing $100&#x2F;yr subscriber. Additionally, it takes an order of magnitude more effort for conversion and your product has to almost match the utility of a smartphone produced by $1T company to even demand that kind of automated recurring payments. The vast majority of fun creative content won&#x27;t qualify for this anyway.<p>However, my bigger beef is with the subscriber model itself which somehow every person wants to impose for their next product. The fact is that it is <i>much easier</i> to convince me to pay $10 to get a new release instead of forcing on me $10&#x2F;yr subscription. The subscription should be <i>optional</i> merely provided as a convenience to the customers who find themselves paying you again and again, not as <i>requirement</i> to use your product. This is a true customer-obsessed point of view. If you have something good to sell, make at least part of it <i>free</i> so people know the value to expect. Rest make it one-time fee and create your upgrades&#x2F;releases appealing enough so people buy them recurringly!

It&#x27;s of course easy to prove if you define the nebulous &#x27;true fans&#x27; as &#x27;fan enough so that $X from each of them support me financially&#x27;.<p>I&#x27;m not against the idea but I know some creatives who operate in spaces where asking $1k a year is a tough sell. I don&#x27;t think many people are paying that for knitting or gardening lessons even from the best but hey, maybe I&#x27;m wrong.<p>It makes sense for skills that can be monetised into a career. A cake decorator I know said the risk is that you&#x27;re training your replacements (but she also said you might as well, or someone else will).

The logical conclusion of this trend has already been reached: Adam Neumann only needed 1 true fan.

But finding those 100 people who care enough to pay for whatever it is you&#x27;re producing must have a cost.<p>There are more ways to reach people now but considering the amount of noise out there it&#x27;s like finding a needle in a haystack or perhaps worse as it&#x27;s more likely, at least for an artistic project that they would need to find you.<p>That&#x27;s without considering the fragility of a business that depends on 100 people. I just find something hokey and fake about this idea of having 100 or 1000 true fans to support you. It&#x27;s especially grating coming from a VC firm whose basis for existence is growth, growth and more growth and then capitalising on that growth in the most ruthless and efficient way possible.

Apart from the practicality of the business process, I would say if your content is in any way &quot;edgy&quot; or skirts close to the edge of the Overton Window [1] I would try and self-host as much as possible. It would be all too easy for a twitter-storm to get you kicked off social media, twitch, patreon, cloudflare, stripe, paypal etc and then your business disappears overnight.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Overton_window" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Overton_window</a>

What I got from this post:<p>Network economy matches userland economy.<p>We should henceforth refer to billionaires as &quot;whales&quot;.

Next up: 1 true fan.

The No Agenda podcast from Adam Curry and John C Dvorak have seemingly successfully worked this model. No adverts, but donation only. Of course many listen to free, but creating producers out of those who donate and giving them credits and shout outs has built an interesting community.<p>What doesn’t work is to cut your prime value out just to those who pay. Then you can’t build momentum and the large fan base.

Is it just me or Passion Economy is a totally empty marketing BS term that doesn&#x27;t really mean anything?

&gt; Here’s how it works: A creator can cultivate a large, free audience on horizontal social platforms or through an email list. He or she can then convert some of those users to patrons and subscribers. The creator can then leverage some of those buyers to higher-value purchases, such as extra content, exclusive access, or direct interaction with the creator.<p>having a couple blogs&#x2F;influencer pages with 20k+ followers are actually most useful (IMO) when starting new brands on new platforms and slowly monetizing (ala gary v&#x27;s Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook as corny as he is it works)<p>&gt; As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love<p>it&#x27;s simply fun growing a brand&#x2F;discovering new communities&#x2F;creating one&#x2F;watching the engagement and metrics

Maybe for a kid paying for school or saving it could be OK, but 100-fans-income is quite <i>volatile</i>. And the end of the day these people are living out from <i>tips</i>, <i>pity</i> and the <i>grace</i> of 1st world country donors (I am saying this while trying not to be controversial).<p>Most fans may be kids (under 25?) and thus <i>volatile</i>, in the way that the creator is off for 1 day and they&#x27;ll replace him&#x2F;her with whatever else is out there, and that&#x27;s 1 percent per lost fan. Or PayPal can decide that your niche is not convenient to them and cut you out, or a fan loses interest, or... countless reasons.<p>Very risky for making a living, IMO.

We actually see a similar pattern on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anim8.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anim8.io</a><p>A couple animators on our platform have extremely dedicated fans making up the majority of the donation revenue.

It looks to me what a16z has just discovered is a service business. A plumber or an SAT tutor or an upholstery shop or whatever basically just needs 100 customers a year paying around $1000.

s&#x2F;fan&#x2F;customer<p>I feel like the comments here cover the main issues with this article. I kept flip-flopping between appreciating the article and disagreeing with it. The two main issues I have with it are:<p>1. $1000&#x2F;year to provide value is a business, not a &quot;passion&quot; in the true sense. 2. Highlighting the outliers of a given platform discredits the concept as something that many people can achieve.<p>&quot;These fans expect to derive meaningful value and purpose from the product.&quot; - yes, that would be a business transaction.<p>This article could be rewritten to say that if you want to create a life-style business, make sure to generate enough value for someone (or a business) that they would be willing to pay $1000&#x2F;year for your product. This will make profitability&#x2F;success much easier.<p>Yes, the original author of 1,000 True Fans retracted his original views after hearing from musicians, but the general concept&#x2F;framework doesn&#x27;t seem to be broken even if the numbers have to be adjusted. The main idea is that you don&#x27;t need millions of people paying you $1 to have success.

&gt; This strategy is closely related to the concept of “whales” in gaming, in which 1 to 2 percent of users drive 80 percent of gaming companies’ revenue<p>Last time I heard of that term - `whale` - it was a reference to a mom whose child was making in-app purchase without her mother&#x27;s consent and&#x2F;or knowing. Unethical behavior cursor to the max.

The real business that A16Z wants is aggregating millions of passion projects. Must have been pitched by something like that

I feel like these numbers are skewed by the sex workers on Patreon offering subscription pornography. It&#x27;d be interesting to see if there&#x27;s a difference between the numbers adult content creators see vs. everyone else.

This talk from MicroConf discusses a similar idea and the origins of the 1000 true fans allegory: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;otbnC2zE2rw?t=273" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;otbnC2zE2rw?t=273</a>

I would like to see some stats from youtube and other platforms actually auditing those sub counts. I really have a hard time believing some youtube channels actually have 10,000 subs, let alone a million. While I agree with the article and the tier system, patreon is basically an e-begging platform. I understand that probably isn&#x27;t popular to say but that is how I see it.

I do now think 1K&#x2F;year is something that will sustain in time. Passion wears out.

Just watched a MicroConf talk mentioned &quot;1000 fan&quot; theory.

This thesis seems like 1000 True Fans hired patio11.

I&#x27;ve seen this work before.

Tl;dr: &quot;Sell your customers what they want, make them pay what you say, be sure they&#x27;re rich enough.&quot;<p>Best paradigm busting advice in business after &quot;If you can secure just 0.1% of the chinese market, you&#x27;ll have 5 milion customers&quot; and &quot;Always remember: profit is revenue <i>minus</i> expense&quot;.

$ whois a1.6z.com

Taking this to extreme :) 100 True Fans ? try 1 Internet has enabled visibility so you need to only find one true fan who is willing to sponsor you 100,000 per year.

In my mind the article reduces to: Paywalls are cool, we need moar of them.

Brilliant!

TLDR: Sell what your customers want to buy.<p>But let&#x27;s call the customers fans and rebrand the whole thing not as Capitalism but as &quot;Passion Economy&quot;, which sounds a lot more noble than &quot;overcharging random strangers on the internet&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m also surprised that &quot;whales&quot; went from a mean joke to mock those with more money than friends into an actual description that they use as a positive term here.

The _Future_ of the <i>Internet</i>, a post-scarce good, is not going to be a Profit Model Powered by The Extraction Economy.<p>It needs a fundamentally different economic model, that measures the <i>gain</i> in value added to the network, not the transaction (rebalance, distribution, etc.) of it: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;free.eco" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;free.eco</a> .

God these guys live in a bubble

Here is a model for the author:<p>give money to things not to people, people should have enough to live. Food, safe place to stay etc.<p>i dont want to pay for people to become rich just necause he&#x2F;she produced a thing I enjoyed.. I dont have to be responsible for artists, creaters being alive, safe etc. I am just a person expects same comfort as creater... creater might have a chance to accomplish his&#x2F;her passion position in life but most of us should&#x2F;must do the ugly things... that doesnt mean that people create something are always good at what they do... actually they are not most of the time...<p>prize tag is for goods not for people...