About a decade ago, before “creators” and “content creators” were a thing, I stumbled across a piece of content online which blew my mind.
It introduced me to the concept of being able to make money from wherever you were in the world as a creative person.
The Ebook, titled 18 Months, 2 Blogs, 6 Figures, by author Corbett Barr shared his philosophy on business, documenting his travels around the world and his journey from monetising 2 different blogs and making a combined 6-figures from them in a period of a year-and-a-half.
It’s one of my all-time favourite reads, and I continue to recommend it to people to this day.
I ended up going down a rabbit-hole, and I came across another piece of content, an essay called 1,000 True Fans by
. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this concept would inform my first steps as a blogger-turned-creator.To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.
— Kevin Kelly, ‘1000 True Fans’
The idea is that you don’t need thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to consume your stuff.
According to this concept, you can be a blogger, a YouTuber, a coach, a candlestick maker… if you have 1,000 people supporting your work, you can make a living as a creator.
Pretty early on in my creator journey, thanks to folks like
& , I got invested in the idea of an email list, so I’m going to talk about ‘subscribers’ now, but you can replace that word with ‘followers’ if you’d like.Let’s do some quick calculations…
To get to those 1,000 true fans, you will - of course - need a bigger audience than that, as not everyone is going to buy from you, let alone be someone who is a super-fan.
Let’s say 10% of your audience are buyers; it’ll take 10,000 subscribers to reach that golden mark.
If we’re going to be more conservative in our estimations, it’ll take 50,000 (5% being buyers) or even 100,000 (1% being buyers) to get to that 1000-true-fan mark.
And so, essentially, you’re having to rely on — and therefore chase — those numbers.
I believe this is one of the reasons why there has been a growing emphasis in the creator world on cohort-based programmes and membership communities. I did this myself with INF club, the blog-turned-community and creator business that I ran previously.
In order for that magic 1000 number to seem possible, I thought I had no choice but to keep growing, and monetising, in a perpetual cycle.
The 1,000 true fans concept led me to push and pursue growth.
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What if there was a better way of doing things?
I’ve long bought into the vision of folks like Corbett, Kevin, Craig Mod, and Paul Jarvis, who advocate a simpler, leaner, more bootstrapped way of doing things, as opposed to raising investment and scaling rapidly.
(Or, as Corbett puts it, pursuing a “lifestyle business”).
12 years after Kevin Kelly penned his original essay, an update to his piece came from a source I wasn’t expecting.
, co-founder of Variant Fund, wrote and shared a piece called ‘100 True Fans’ on her blog, and that of Marc Andreessen, the well-known VC and former co-founder of Netscape (plus co-creator of the Mosaic internet browser, if you’re old enough to remember what that is).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… direct interaction with the creator.
— Li Jin, 100 True Fans
I want to share why this is so important for every writer or creator or creative person reading this who wants to make money.
Rather than having to focus on monetising from paid memberships or through filling out large cohort-based programmes, you can instead sell 1:1 or small group programmes, charging $500-5,000 per client.
Framed another way, you can work with dozens of people each year, rather than having to rely on smaller payments from hundreds or thousands of people.
This has been a complete mindset shift for me, and I believe this is groundbreaking for creators and creatives.
How?
Well, I was at a comedy show in London this week…
Instead of having to rely on gigs, what if this comedian packaged his expertise and sold it to help other, aspiring comedians, instead?
(You don’t have to be an expert, you just have to be further along than others)
One of my favourite artists is the musician Tim Bergling, known as Avicii, who sadly passed in 2018, aged 28. He had shared his struggles with touring and the accompanying anxiety it would bring. During Summer festival season, he would play a show by night, fly to another location by dawn and catch up on sleep, and do the same thing the next night… every day of the week. He performed at up to 250 shows in a year.
What if Tim had, instead, found a way to make the music he so loved, alongside making an income online from music consulting services, rather than being sucked into the beast that is the traditional music industry, and ultimately caused him to suffer doing something he so loved?
When we re-frame the ‘1000 True Fans’ concept to that of ‘100 True Fans’, all sorts of possibilities can open up for us.
from,
Jasraj x
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PS. A quote from Tim features in the latest book by Indie Writer Press, The INFP Writer:
