[HN Gopher] 1k True Fans (2008)
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1k True Fans (2008)
Author : Tomte
Score : 76 points
Date : 2022-12-25 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kk.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (kk.org)
| grepLeigh wrote:
| 1,000 true fans is an essay about a thousand die-hard fans paying
| a content creator $100/year, which comes out to 100k before taxes
| and expenses.
|
| I'd argue that if you're smart enough to be reading this website,
| you're smart enough to create and sell a piece of software to 10
| businesses. If you can add 2% of revenue/quarter or save 5-10% of
| an expense, you can name your price (as long as it's below the
| amount of revenue you generated or money you saved).
| Paradoxically, it's easier to charge lots of money vs. convince
| lots of people to give you a little bit of money. If you don't
| believe me, I encourage you to run a time-boxed experiment where
| you attempt to do both for 1 month. Post your findings to
| HackerNews!
|
| This might seem more boring compared to 1,000 fans (1,000 people
| who follow you is a great dopamine hit), but it's also much
| easier!
| rafale wrote:
| > I'd argue that if you're smart enough to be reading this
| website...
|
| I would agree that the average IQ (or potential in general) of
| the HN readers is more than that of the general population, but
| I disagree there is any minimum threshold here in any capacity
| that warrant your statement. Many readers here can't code at
| all, or couldn't learn to well enough to build and market
| software.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Brilliant point.
|
| May I ask if anyone is aware what type of businesses to target?
| SMB?
|
| I always thought enterprise has super long sale cycles and
| won't trust a new product easily ( more decision makers) but to
| get 10 businesses to pay $833 wouldn't that need enterprise
| customers not SMB?
| paulpauper wrote:
| This again? 1k true fans, like the 10k hours rule popularized by
| Gladwell or the Purple Cow by Godin, etc. sounds better on paper
| than in practice, but there are always caveats and major
| survivorship bias. Getting those 1k fans is quite hard, as it
| turns out, maybe impossible even though it's not that many on an
| absolute basis. According to Kevin Kelly, a true fan is more than
| just a Twitter follower or a Facebook like. It's someone who is a
| paying customer or will refer others.
|
| https://greyenlightenment.com/2022/06/26/1000-true-fans-long...
|
| How do you get those 1k fans? Hard enough just getting 1000 hits
| to a website, 1000 people to even click a link, etc.
|
| It's like MLM. "All you need is 2 people ..and then they tell 2
| people, etc."
| mustafabisic1 wrote:
| Every time I've read this article it hit differently.
|
| Reading 1 (2016): Oh man it'd be great to have 1k true fans. This
| guy makes it easy. Reading 2 (2019): Now I have some things in
| life and I should build, how hard could it be. You try and fail.
| Reading 3 (2022): You've gained even more experience and go for
| it hard. You realize that the guy had disclaimers across the
| article (like this: The truth is that cultivating a thousand true
| fans is time consuming, sometimes nerve racking, and not for
| everyone. )
|
| Not sure what the 4th reading will bring, but if you're a remote
| working parent check out my work - https://thursdaydigest.com/
|
| Not sure what the
|
| It especially hits differently now that I'm a builder.
| yunruse wrote:
| In general I think this is why embracing tiered levels of
| payment/subscription seems to be working for a lot of people --
| it captures the fan-intensity curve, providing a structure which
| is both fit to hyper-fans and casual fans alike, whatever the
| business model is. This seems to explain to me the rise of tiered
| models (Patreon, Kickstarter, ads-or-premium, freemium apps,
| etc), and why DLCs and sequels tend to be more popular in media.
|
| Heuristics like these seem to work by exploiting general
| properties of this Pareto-y curve. Obviously people in real life
| don't necessarily follow curves... but as a total economics
| laywoman, it is intriguing to see how, similarly to a supply-
| demand curve for physical goods, a Zipfian curve of "fan
| intensity vs frequency" (as shown in the article) has sort of
| begun to show itself in various places.
| willhinsa wrote:
| You only need 1 true fan if it's the right fan!
|
| There was a (uploaded to TikTok) video I saw where this guy had
| 18 followers on YouTube, and just was not getting any kind of
| traction at all. I mean some traction but not much -- only 18
| followers! Was about to quit. Then all of a sudden he got
| contacted by Oprah Winfrey's people about hosting a TV show about
| the ideas that he talked about in his videos.
|
| It turns out that one of the 18 followers he had on YouTube was
| Oprah Winfrey's hair stylist, and Oprah was talking to her about
| this project she was trying to get started, and the stylist
| mentioned this one YouTube account she loved who was all about
| that topic, and the rest is history.
|
| Every single person who watches your video is a unique human
| individual, and magic can happen from just one spark, from just
| one person!
| neilv wrote:
| This is part of why I abandoned my one-stop book on practical
| software engineering in a powerful fringe language.
|
| Rather than 1,000 true fans who'd buy anything I create, for $100
| per fan per year... I could invest half a year of intense work on
| the book, and be pretty sure at least 10 people would buy it for
| $25, out of a sense of obligation. $50 would be pushing my luck.
| cgag wrote:
| My friend showed me a cool series of photography books he'd
| backed on Kickstarter called Vanishing Asia. Only after we'd
| finished flipping through them did I realize they were by Kevin
| Kelly. I just looked up the campaign
| (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kk-org/vanishing-asia):
| 2,348 backers pledged $603,420 to help bring this project to
| life.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Reminds me of this story:
|
| Influencer with 2 million "fans" fails to sell 252 t-shirts out
| of her new collection.
|
| https://de.style.yahoo.com/influencerin-mit-2-millionen-fans...
| MrLeap wrote:
| Does anyone have any suggestions where I could go looking for
| fans? I'm making a text editor/game where you write text
| documents with tentacle arms. Learn ritual magic based on what
| you write / activate machines by writing.
|
| I've got about 1400 followers on twitter, had a few semi-
| successful posts on reddit. Tiktok did less well. My weathervane
| is currently pointed towards doing more on YouTube. Enough people
| have downloaded the demo on steam that a few novels worth of text
| has probably been written with it, so that's fun. I'm not at a
| point where I can discern my count of who is a _true fan_, but
| there's probably a few in there.
| bhaak wrote:
| If it's a game I wonder why you tried TikTok but not Twitch?
|
| That would probably need more time involvement than TikTok but
| most game livestreams are still on Twitch.
|
| Although from your description I'm not sure how much of a
| spectators game it is.
| coldtea wrote:
| This idea reminds me of something I've read on some old blog post
| about enterpreneurship.
|
| So, the guys starting the company were excited, because they said
| "We know the odds are small, but we don't need much, if just 1 in
| 1000 buys our product we're rich, as that's like 350K people in
| the US. And how difficult would be to get 1 in 1000 to buy our
| stuff with a little marketing? It's a great product anyway! Heck,
| if just 1 in 10,000 buys our product, that's still 35K sales,
| enough to bootstrap the company and make some decent profit! And
| 1 in 10,000 should be trivial!"
|
| Ultimately, though the message the author of the post got from
| that business plan failing miserably, is that there's always the
| posibility of 0 in 1000 buying their product...
|
| "Just get 1000 true fans" downplays the difficulty.
| Mtinie wrote:
| Does it downplay the difficulty?
|
| As an artist, I appreciate the statement because it reminds me
| to appropriately scope what tiers of "success" can mean.
|
| I have zero illusions about the ease of convincing 1000 people
| to trade their money for works I've produced. But 1000 people
| is a small enough number that I can conceive of in my minds eye
| and then plan concrete steps to try to make it happen.
| essayist wrote:
| Kelly writes: The truth is that cultivating a
| thousand true fans is time consuming, sometimes nerve racking,
| and not for everyone. Done well (and why not do it well?) it
| can become another full-time job. At best it will be a
| consuming and challenging part-time task that requires ongoing
| skills.
|
| I'd add now, mostly from unsuccessful experience, _what does it
| take the first fan, and then the next one, and the one after
| that?_ For a lot of people, it 's still some version of _and
| then magic happens_.
|
| Bonus true story: I worked for an economic
| consulting/data/analytical software timesharing firm in the
| early '80s. They could see that PCs were going to be a huge
| threat, so they tried to sell "data kits". For instance (and
| I'm making up the numbers), for $50 you could buy a download of
| 10 years of GDP data or similar.
|
| Their market logic was: if we just get 1% of the PC market,
| we'll be rich.
|
| Spoiler: we didn't get 0.1%.
| ugjka wrote:
| If you read their definition of a true fan they sound like
| borderline insane
|
| >A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you
| produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you
| sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible
| versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine
| sight unseen; they will pay for the "best-of" DVD version of
| your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef's table
| once a month.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| Yeah, seems like maybe they will also show up at your house
| unannounced and uninvited!
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| sounds like someone in love
| jmathai wrote:
| The 1k true fans approach is the most suitable one for most
| people looking to build a business or income stream. It lets you
| hyper focus on a niche that may not be well served by more
| general purpose solutions.
|
| But don't let the 1k number fool you. Getting even 1 true fan is
| incredibly difficult. But the idea is that if you can get 1, you
| can find your 2nd, then 4th, 8th, 16th, 32nd, 64th, 128th, 256th,
| 512th and finally your 1k.
|
| It's a tractable number of steps. Hard, but something you can
| wrap your brain around and small enough to start focusing.
|
| A personal example is that I've a few hundred passionate users of
| my photo management software [1]. It's open source so they aren't
| paying for it. I've tried a few ideas without much success to
| provide a fiscally beneficial aspect of it - without much luck
| yet. But it remains one of the best opportunities for me to
| create a small community of people willing to pay for something I
| create - which is my goal.
|
| [1] https://getelodie.com
|
| [1 also] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Also the first fan could be yourself, if you kid yourself
| thinking you love it then you will suffer endless questions on
| why it isn't taking off.
| blueboo wrote:
| In some sense, it has to be yourself. If you're not fully
| bought-in to the value to the extent that you genuinely enjoy
| and benefit from using it, you're forced to hypothesise about
| that first true fan, even if she sits across from you.
|
| More likely you'll get lost in discussion of personas and
| market segments and user journeys and end up condescending to
| your audience.
|
| In short, you've got feel the need for the thing to exist--
| for yourself.
| jmathai wrote:
| I think the 1k true fans approach means going deep instead
| of wide. And in order to do so you need to really
| understand what would make people fans of your work.
|
| A mistake many people make is that they mistake low intent
| interest as a proxy for opportunity. You can't always ask
| people what they want. You have to build a thing that
| intersects with their (often subconscious) needs. This is
| where scratching an itch you have a deep understanding of
| is helpful.
| rafram wrote:
| Nitpick: On Elodie's homepage, "No Propietary Database" should
| be "No Proprietary Database".
| boredemployee wrote:
| Yep. To get one real fan, other than your mom and your
| girlfriend is super hard. I worked as a professional music
| producer and dj for 10 years in a good niche, paid my bills and
| raised my kid for that long, and while many other djs and
| producers played my music productions/compositions and threated
| me as one of the best in my country, my career never took off.
| Today I do it as a hobby in my free time and no one really
| seemed to care that I stop doing it lol so maybe I never had a
| single REAL fan.
| metadat wrote:
| Previous discussions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26270182 (Feb 2021; 120
| points, 66 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21369257 (Oct 2019; 71
| points, 24 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17007347 (May 2018; 69
| points, 8 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10625906 (Nov 2015; 47
| points, 9 comments)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1338957 (May 2010; 35
| points, 10 comments)
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