1,000 True Fans 😍

It’s easy to take the current moment for granted.

A decade and a half ago, there were a handful of bloggers—but nothing like today’s 200+ million creators making money online.

Online education (or “E-learning”) was a distant dream, rather than today’s $200+ billion industry.

Yet Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired, saw the future coming.

He published an article that became a manifesto for creators. Tim Ferris included the essay in his book Tools of Titans, as did I in Survive and Thrive: How to Build a Profitable Business in Any Economy (Including This One).

This essay is my very short list of “must reads” for anyone who wants to build an online education business, so I’ve shared the entire essay below.

1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly (My Emphasis Added)

To be a successful creator you don’t need millions.

A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce.

First, you have to create enough each year that you can earn, on average, $100 profit from each true fan

Second, you must have a direct relationship with your fans

A thousand customers is a whole lot more feasible to aim for than a million fans.

The number 1,000 is not absolute. Its significance is in its rough order of magnitude — three orders less than a million.

Another way to calculate the support of a true fan, is to aim to get one day’s wages per year from them.

While the support of a thousand true fans may be sufficient for a living, for every single true fan, you might have two or three regular fans.

despite being in business for hundreds of years no New York book publisher knew the names of their core and dedicated readers.everyone has access to excellent tools that allow anyone to sell directly to anyone else in the world.

the total sales of all the lowest selling obscure items would equal or in some cases exceed the sales of the few best selling items

Whatever your interests as a creator are, your 1,000 true fans are one click from you.Every thing made, or thought of, can interest at least one person in a million — it’s a low bar. Yet if even only one out of million people were interested, that’s potentially 7,000 people on the planet.

the big corporations, the intermediates, the commercial producers, are all under-equipped and ill suited to connect with these thousand true fans.

The average number of supporters for a successful Kickstarter project is 241 funders — far less than a thousand.

The truth is that cultivating a thousand true fans is time consuming, sometimes nerve racking, and not for everyone.

The mathematics of 1,000 true fans is not a binary choice.

1,000 true fans is an alternative path to success other than stardom

I'll add just one thought to this concept, based on my experience of what works (and where most creators go wrong).

Don't seek 1,000 True Fans. Seek 1 true fan 1,000 times.