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%.