1k True Fans (2008)
kk.org
1k True Fans (2008)
1–10 of 147 posts
Re: 1k True Fans (2008)
#2The 1k true fans approach is the most suitable one for most people looking to build a business or income stream. It lets you hyper focus on a niche that may not be well served by more general purpose solutions.
But don’t let the 1k number fool you. Getting even 1 true fan is incredibly difficult. But the idea is that if you can get 1, you can find your 2nd, then 4th, 8th, 16th, 32nd, 64th, 128th, 256th, 512th and finally your 1k.
It’s a tractable number of steps. Hard, but something you can wrap your brain around and small enough to start focusing.
A personal example is that I’ve a few hundred passionate users of my photo management software [1]. It’s open source so they aren’t paying for it. I’ve tried a few ideas without much success to provide a fiscally beneficial aspect of it - without much luck yet. But it remains one of the best opportunities for me to create a small community of people willing to pay for something I create - which is my goal.
[1 also] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie
Re: 1k True Fans (2008)
#3The 1k true fans approach is the most suitable one for most people looking to build a business or income stream. It lets you hyper focus on a niche that may not be well served by more general purpose solutions. But don’t let the 1k number fool you. Getting even 1 true fan is incredibly difficult. But the idea is that if you can get 1, you can find your 2nd, then 4th, 8th, 16th, 32nd, 64th, 128th, 256th, 512th and fin…
Also the first fan could be yourself, if you kid yourself thinking you love it then you will suffer endless questions on why it isn’t taking off.
Re: 1k True Fans (2008)
#4The 1k true fans approach is the most suitable one for most people looking to build a business or income stream. It lets you hyper focus on a niche that may not be well served by more general purpose solutions. But don’t let the 1k number fool you. Getting even 1 true fan is incredibly difficult. But the idea is that if you can get 1, you can find your 2nd, then 4th, 8th, 16th, 32nd, 64th, 128th, 256th, 512th and fin…
Yep. To get one real fan, other than your mom and your girlfriend is super hard. I worked as a professional music producer and dj for 10 years in a good niche, paid my bills and raised my kid for that long, and while many other djs and producers played my music productions/compositions and threated me as one of the best in my country, my career never took off. Today I do it as a hobby in my free time and no one really seemed to care that I stop doing it lol so maybe I never had a single REAL fan.
Re: 1k True Fans (2008)
#5Every time I've read this article it hit differently.
Reading 1 (2016): Oh man it'd be great to have 1k true fans. This guy makes it easy. Reading 2 (2019): Now I have some things in life and I should build, how hard could it be. You try and fail. Reading 3 (2022): You've gained even more experience and go for it hard. You realize that the guy had disclaimers across the article (like this: The truth is that cultivating a thousand true fans is time consuming, sometimes nerve racking, and not for everyone. )
Not sure what the 4th reading will bring, but if you're a remote working parent check out my work - https://thursdaydigest.com/
Not sure what the
It especially hits differently now that I'm a builder.
Re: 1k True Fans (2008)
#6Previous discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26270182 (Feb 2021; 120 points, 66 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21369257 (Oct 2019; 71 points, 24 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17007347 (May 2018; 69 points, 8 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10625906 (Nov 2015; 47 points, 9 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1338957 (May 2010; 35 points, 10 comments)
Re: 1k True Fans (2008)
#7The 1k true fans approach is the most suitable one for most people looking to build a business or income stream. It lets you hyper focus on a niche that may not be well served by more general purpose solutions. But don’t let the 1k number fool you. Getting even 1 true fan is incredibly difficult. But the idea is that if you can get 1, you can find your 2nd, then 4th, 8th, 16th, 32nd, 64th, 128th, 256th, 512th and fin…
Also the first fan could be yourself, if you kid yourself thinking you love it then you will suffer endless questions on why it isn’t taking off.
In some sense, it has to be yourself. If you’re not fully bought-in to the value to the extent that you genuinely enjoy and benefit from using it, you’re forced to hypothesise about that first true fan, even if she sits across from you.
More likely you’ll get lost in discussion of personas and market segments and user journeys and end up condescending to your audience.
In short, you’ve got feel the need for the thing to exist—for yourself.
Re: 1k True Fans (2008)
#8In general I think this is why embracing tiered levels of payment/subscription seems to be working for a lot of people -- it captures the fan-intensity curve, providing a structure which is both fit to hyper-fans and casual fans alike, whatever the business model is. This seems to explain to me the rise of tiered models (Patreon, Kickstarter, ads-or-premium, freemium apps, etc), and why DLCs and sequels tend to be more popular in media.
Heuristics like these seem to work by exploiting general properties of this Pareto-y curve. Obviously people in real life don't necessarily follow curves... but as a total economics laywoman, it is intriguing to see how, similarly to a supply-demand curve for physical goods, a Zipfian curve of "fan intensity vs frequency" (as shown in the article) has sort of begun to show itself in various places.
Re: 1k True Fans (2008)
#9This is part of why I abandoned my one-stop book on practical software engineering in a powerful fringe language.
Rather than 1,000 true fans who'd buy anything I create, for $100 per fan per year... I could invest half a year of intense work on the book, and be pretty sure at least 10 people would buy it for $25, out of a sense of obligation. $50 would be pushing my luck.
Re: 1k True Fans (2008)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also the first fan could be yourself, if you kid yourself thinking you love it then you will suffer endless questions on why it isn’t taking off.
In some sense, it has to be yourself. If you’re not fully bought-in to the value to the extent that you genuinely enjoy and benefit from using it, you’re forced to hypothesise about that first true fan, even if she sits across from you. More likely you’ll get lost in discussion of personas and market segments and user journeys and end up condescending to your audience. In short, you’ve got feel the need for the thing…
I think the 1k true fans approach means going deep instead of wide. And in order to do so you need to really understand what would make people fans of your work.
A mistake many people make is that they mistake low intent interest as a proxy for opportunity. You can’t always ask people what they want. You have to build a thing that intersects with their (often subconscious) needs. This is where scratching an itch you have a deep understanding of is helpful.