202207162146 - { 1000 True 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.
A true fan 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.
First, you have to create enough each year that you can earn, on average, $100 profit from each true fan.
Second, your fans must pay you directly.
The number 1,000 is not absolute. Its significance is in its rough order of magnitude — three orders less than a million
- get one day’s wages per year from them.
the enthusiasm of true fans can increase the patronage of regular fans. True fans not only are the direct source of your income, but also your chief marketing force for the ordinary fans.
- In other words the most obscure under-selling book, song, or idea, is only one click away from the best selling book, song or idea.
Chris Anderson (my successor at Wired) named this effect 202207162148 - The Long Tail
- Aggregators had great incentive to encourage audiences to click on the obscure items

if even only one out of million people were interested, that’s potentially 7,000 people on the planet. That means that any 1-in-a-million appeal can find 1,000 true fans. The trick is to practically find those fans, or more accurately, to have them find you.
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.
If you have 1,000 true fans you can do a crowdfunding campaign, because by definition a true fan will become a Kickstarter funder.
1,000 true fans is an alternative path to success other than stardom. Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum bestseller hits, blockbusters, and celebrity status, you can aim for direct connection with a thousand true fans.