1,000 True Fans (2008)
kk.org
kk.org
1,000 True Fans (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21369257 - Oct 2019 (24 comments)
1,000 True Fans (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17007347 - May 2018 (7 comments)
1,000 True Fans (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10625906 - Nov 2015 (8 comments)
All you need are 1,000 true fans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1338957 - May 2010 (10 comments)
The Problem With 1,000 True Fans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=922919 - Nov 2009 (6 comments)
>In the early 1900s, an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist, and philosopher (but he was probably no fun at parties, so you got him there) named Vilfredo Pareto became fascinated by the ideas of wealth and power – namely, how is wealth distributed across society? (Interestingly, he did not start this work until his forties, so it is never to late to make a difference.)
>Ever diligent, he pulled data from the 1400s through his modern times and found the same pattern everywhere. Whereas people had previously assumed that wealth would be distributed in a flat, upward-sloping line from poor to rich, what Pareto found was in fact a hockey stick – a small percentage of the population holds a majority of the wealth.[1]
So basically, a small number of all the "individuals" account for a large portion of the overall pool... the same would be true for fans... there is a universe of potential fans out there... millions of them. You need to find the ones at the edge of the chart that are willing to pay - those are true fans.
Other examples:
>The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books. A million and a half separately titled books (!) sell each year in the US. However, only five hundred of these sell more than a hundred thousand copies. Similarly, just four classical composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky) wrote almost all the music played by modern orchestras.
So I think the takeaway is, focus on making those people that truly care happy. Don't try to make the 90%+ that are not going to pay you much happy. Make the smaller percentage that are going to be with you for years with large money happy... it is easy to chase short term profits or short term incentives... invest in the long term for those rare ones that find value in what you are doing AND are willing to pay for it.
[1] Chart here: https://www.butwhatfor.com/stand-up-straight-with-your-shoul...
Whales are nice to have but any financial model that includes them is gonna end up focusing on pleasing them. With a broader fan base I mostly need to worry about doing creative work that pleases me.
(I am an artist, and Patreon is a big chunk of how my finances work; this is based on my personal experience of how much stress I feel when a low-level patron leaves vs. a high-level one. Someone else will always show up to replace the low-level ones, not so much with the high-level ones.)
Woah.
That was a beautifully put summary of something I (and I suspect many others) have intuitively known, but perhaps have never articulated so well.
Framing it like this helps to make it a memorable guiding principle in all strategic decisions going forward.
Just wanted to say thanks.
It has all the features of a mildly upvoted HN discussion or an infinitely downvoted Reddit one.
Sure, you get more money by serving a few whales, whether those be giant megacorps you customize your SaaS for, or people willing to pay a couple orders of magnitude more than anyone else for your artwork - but you're gonna have some powerful inducements to change what you make for those whales' needs, even if those are directions that lose you smaller fans.
And when you lose one of those whales, it's a blow.
I completly understand where you are coming from, but most of our historical art is because of "whales", so all in all I don't think whales are bad for art. I am sure Leonardo would have preferred not to be under pressure from whichever prince he was currently working for, but did his art suffer?
I am not saying a whale is required, van Gogh is a good example, but even van Gogh might have benefited from a whale.
Those historical 'whales' you're referring to frequently would finance art for reasons bigger than just their own fancy or pleasure, for political reasons, for diplomacy, for communication, for power grabs.
And then artists would have their own way with exerting their own power over the process as well.
As an artist, I feel that there is a sort of scale of priorities. Making money with my art skills is more fun than making money with any other way. But there are things I like to draw, and I'd rather make money drawing those instead of things I don't like to draw. And I'd generally rather make money by drawing whatever the heck my muse directs me to draw, instead of what I think is likely to sell, or what someone with a lot of money would like me to draw.
Different people have different priorities, someone who's willing to draw whatever the hell comes their way probably makes more money than I do, and that's their choice. I have an artist friend who mostly dropped off the net for a few years because he was doing lots of very specific fetish art for a rich client who didn't want it posted anywhere, and was willing to pay handsomely for that. He was willing to do that, I wouldn't. He also had a kid to support, I don't.
And... poor Vince certainly could have used a richer set of patrons, yeah. He could have used a lot of things. Possibly including some modern psychoactive chemicals. Dude was pretty fucked up.
After all, we've all heard of bands who'd rather be playing their new stuff, but who know the fans at concerts want to hear the old hits.
This is no model to live your life.
I just think that's true for people with a large number of customers too.
If customers have subscribed to my patreon to see my artwork of scantily clad anime ladies, I gotta keep giving them what they want whether I've got 100 customers paying $100/month or 10,000 customers paying $1/month.
I am of the opinion that every established Content Creator starts to care less and less. And is better off for it! And I am also of the opinion that George RR Martin/JK Rowling/Tom Clancy/Stephen King loathe their most hardcore fans while being paid to attend Cons. Inevitable.
1000 True Fans? Try 100 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22263274 - Feb 2020 (217 comments)
An extra zero would be nice but I'm very grateful for 100. In addition to the article above, these writings provided a lot of inspiration:
- https://web.archive.org/web/20090321145348/https://plentyoff...
- https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/reconsider-41adf356857f
- https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/building-a-one-man-saas-app-...
“ 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. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.”
The title already was clear, and the quote you posted doesn't change anything.
So, to talk in paradigms, it's not so much that the article is "bait and switch" but that maybe you were expecting a "silver bullet".
>but in my opinion, it’s trash garbage writing.
Whatever. It's an article that makes a simple observation: that in this day and age, there are ways to make a viable living with small-scale patronage, facilitated by the internet, direct payments, and so on.
It's not about being it easy to make it without putting the work.
Well, I do have a few Patreon accounts I support, so there's that. As for $100+, I have given such amounts to several causes (devs working on something like Asahi Linux etc).
And there are indeed lots of people who are $100+ Patreon / Substack, etc supporters as you can see directly there. Not to mention OnlyFans, where the amounts can get crazy...
However, and this is my autism not being able to let stuff go, as I realize i should let this thread die a peaceful death, however, a few dollars split among many, doesn't make you a quote unquote true fan, in the definition of the article. I will now stop arguing with you, as you support developers with your personal dollars. Regarding only fans, i'm pretty sure that crosses over to paying for a service rather than paying for entertainment, although it does have 'fan' in the title so you've got me there at least.
HN has a delay before showing the reply button. IIRC you can overcome it by clicking on the date of the fresh post you want to reply to.
It's pretty affordable to buy the entire output of a band or author if you're a working adult and they're only putting out a $20 release every 2 years - so probably quite a large fraction of their fans buy their entire output.
And subscriptions to magazines are of course commonplace (or were pre-internet, at least)
On the other hand, if you're creating youtube videos, it's normal to have a lot more subscribers than patrons. And if you're making a syndicated TV show, there might not be a single fan paying per piece of work that you produce.
So it's about more than the number of fans, it's related to the perceived value of individual copies of the work (and how monitizable, sorry horrible word) it is.
So a fine artist working in the digital space with a couple of thousand fans, may well be able to make decent money selling prints and NFTs. But a musician, writer or filmmaker will likely need several hundred thousand fans to build a useful number of 'true fans'. A youtuber may need millions of 'fans' to garner the same number of regularly cash supportive fans.
Twitter wants to promote the people who have 1k fans to turn them into 10k fans and 10x the revenue.
That said, as Twitter is now shilling paid newsletters, I'm sure they'd prefer 1000 users targeting a follower base of 1000 followers, instead of say 100 users targeting a base of 100k followers.
I put out a lot of plugins and make the case that if you'd have bought one of them per year at the previous price, to join my Patreon at $50 a year.
I also suggest that if you're using lots of the plugins, to multiply that, but I don't do other things to encourage whales, leave them as un-served as possible: they get nothing free customers don't get, and my energy goes towards supporting those who are too poor to do any of this.
I've got over 600 patrons and the model works. One thing I would note is: since you're no kind of celebrity doing this, you're operating with a strange sort of fanbase. I am just an isolated hacker who's been pursuing audio quality for a quarter century or more, and who's been desperately poor and so I make a point to support the struggling artist. However, this makes the social dynamic between me and these 'true fans' weird.
The 'whales' are predictable and I discourage them by not giving them special things: they want custom plugins and for me to build stuff exactly to their tastes, assuming their tastes are the only thing that matters. The semi-fans are also easy: they don't give anything and don't ask for much, they're just watching. But some of the true fans are throwing money because they've identified things about me that they have trouble contextualizing: they'll say 'genius', they'll call me 'sir' as if I was some knight, and surprisingly often they'll literally call me Jesus Christ as apparently that's their only model for somebody trying to give substantial amounts of stuff without demanding payment.
Gotta be patient with this. "1000 true fans" is real. But ask yourself, how does a true fan, a 'most intense and passionate' fan, act? Are you emotionally ready for making these parasocial connections with a hell of a lot of people (more than can fit in your house) who are not casual, not measured, not calm about their fandom?
If you extrapolate what in yourself or your project would elicit this kind of fandom, you're looking at a sort of private army dedicated to your values. It's worth thinking about what values you embody that you'd like to see multplied 1000 times and set out there in the world. Like I said, I have to be patient with mine: they're not difficult, but it freaks me out sometimes when they get super hyperbolic. If I was all about punishing evildoers, my 600 fans (being hyperbolic) would be a pretty fearsome army.
Definitely not possible to earn 100k per year from 1,000 fans through music streaming alone. Musicians earn about $0.005 per stream on Spotify. To ear $100 from a single fan, that fan would need to listen to 20,000 songs, or about 1,000 hours. There are only around 720 hours in a month.
You don't have to earn the $100 profit from each fan from just the core of your 'production' - think more sideways.
Right now I earn from Book sales, YouTube, Patreon, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, speaking engagements, merchandise (I need to expand), private one on one consulting calls, etc.
> Second, you must have a direct relationship with your fans. That is, they must pay you directly.
Spotify is acting as an intermediary, presumably you as the artist sacrificing more of the profit from a digital sale to reach more of an audience.