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1k True Fans (2008)

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Re: 1k True Fans (2008)

#111

Post by iamben »

myleshenderson wrote: post #110
noduerme wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every great artist seems to invent the self-control to do this, whether it's writing 5 pages a day or waking up early to paint, in many cases as a response to the ennui and disintegration of an overabundance of unstructured freedom. I'm not one of those guys because it's really difficult to reshape your life into that structure.. But all it really requires is willpower. For me, concentration of that level only…

I just finished the book 4000 Weeks, and it deals with some of the things that you mention here. Maybe you'd get something from it. It is ostensibly a book about time management; it's in the subtitle. It seems actually to be a book that says: We can't get it all done. We're still good enough. Get clear on what's important and spend time on those things

I very much second this book. I'm not sure it teaches anything groundbreaking/new, but just seeing the words on a page was hugely valuable to me in the same sort of way that saying the things that rattle around in your head out loud to a therapist is. It really helped me gain some clarity on my own direction.

Re: 1k True Fans (2008)

#112

Post by closewith »

brookst wrote: post #32
grepLeigh wrote: post #16

1,000 true fans is an essay about a thousand die-hard fans paying a content creator $100/year, which comes out to 100k before taxes and expenses. I'd argue that if you're smart enough to be reading this website, you're smart enough to create and sell a piece of software to 10 businesses. If you can add 2% of revenue/quarter or save 5-10% of an expense, you can name your price (as long as it's below the amount of reve…

I like your vision and commitment, but when I read your comment I think “that’s 10 businesses that will want support and upgrades forever, who will call you in the middle of the night, who will expect the world of you because they depend on you”. It’s a great model and I applaud it, but I would much rather have 1000 (preferably 5000!) consumers paying me $100/ea/year than have 10 businesses paying me $100k/ea/year.

> I like your vision and commitment, but when I read your comment I think “that’s 10 businesses that will want support and upgrades forever, who will call you in the middle of the night, who will expect the world of you because they depend on you”.

My own experience is the polar opposite to this. I run a small software business selling to enterprise customers where the minimum subscription is €5k per month and even my most demanding customers require less customer service and make less demands than I used to get for a $1 android app I used to sell.

Re: 1k True Fans (2008)

#113

Post by boredemployee »

RHSman2 wrote: post #103
boredemployee wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reall…

I hope you have the time to write about this in more depth.

I will! :)

Re: 1k True Fans (2008)

#114

Post by boredemployee »

justhw wrote: post #76
boredemployee wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reall…

What genre if you don't mind? I'm curious if we can hear your mix.

mostly house and deep house (influenced by chicago and detroit artists)

Re: 1k True Fans (2008)

#115

Post by alistairw »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #107
alistairw wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a long-ish time fan of Dave's. I've been following his work on and off for the past ~decade or so. I've bought a number of his prints and have visited his shop in Asakusa. I've been thinking about this for some time now, but I think the key to a number of artists successes has been the ability to combine what you've laid out here. Long term dedication to the work & with expressing the passion for that work — thro…

> (I'm sure he would hate being compared to Van Gogh though, so I apologise to him for that) Why? I'd bet most people wouldn't mind at all.

He's quite a humble guy and would think it's too much, I imagine. Separately he talks about his work being a craft and specifically not an art form

Re: 1k True Fans (2008)

#116

Post by wingerlang »

willhinsa wrote: post #22

You only need 1 true fan if it's the right fan! There was a (uploaded to TikTok) video I saw where this guy had 18 followers on YouTube, and just was not getting any kind of traction at all. I mean some traction but not much -- only 18 followers! Was about to quit. Then all of a sudden he got contacted by Oprah Winfrey's people about hosting a TV show about the ideas that he talked about in his videos. It turns out t…

Who was that, and what was the idea?

Re: 1k True Fans (2008)

#117

Post by scarface74 »

grepLeigh wrote: post #16

1,000 true fans is an essay about a thousand die-hard fans paying a content creator $100/year, which comes out to 100k before taxes and expenses. I'd argue that if you're smart enough to be reading this website, you're smart enough to create and sell a piece of software to 10 businesses. If you can add 2% of revenue/quarter or save 5-10% of an expense, you can name your price (as long as it's below the amount of reve…

As a preface: I’m sure my tone regarding “enterprise devs” is going to sound insulting. But for all intents and purposes that’s what I did most of my career until I learned “cloud”.

This is definitely not true. I have no idea where the conceit comes from that everyone can sell software to 10 businesses.

Most small businesses don’t have unique problems and are already served by various SaaS companies that do it at scale.

Statistically, if you’re a software developer on either side of the bimodal divide in the US.

A) enterprise corp dev doing boring old CRUD work working in any major city in the US with two or three years of experience [1] and one job hop you can easily make over twice the local median household income for the area

B) working for one of the BigTech companies where fresh college grads make twice the median household income - ie they come out of school with offers of $150K+

At my first tech lead job I was forced to hire your standard C# CRUD contractors for a lot of the integration work I was doing. We were paying the contracting company about $100 an hour. But the contractors themselves were making $60-$70/hour. You’re not going to get a company to pay outrageous rates for Tun of the mill staff augmentation type jobs.

On the other hand, at the last minute, management decided to “move to the cloud”. I didn’t know cloud from a hole in the wall back then. Those “consultants” made good money.

Six months later after going through one AWS certification just so I could talk the talk , I realized that they really didn’t know much, led us astray and were just a bunch of old school netOps people who treated AWS as an overpriced Colo.

That’s when I decided to switch companies, get some hands on experience with true “DevOps” - combining my development experience with AWS and specialize in what I became to know as “cloud application modernization”.

Now I could charge companies a lot for my expertise. But I didn’t want the hassle of working for myself so I got a permanent job in the consulting department at BigTech.

Re: 1k True Fans (2008)

#118

Post by amelius »

tester457 wrote: post #63
amelius wrote: post #28

This can't work, otherwise people would make actual money from publishing e.g. technical books, which we know is not really profitable.

I think a true fan only applies to creative works that people consume for the sake of enjoyment. Because most people only read technical books to attain skills, not for fun. Theres not much that separates the one Tedious Tome of Typescript from another, even if the author's style is different. Meanwhile people genuinely want to consume art for fun by paying for patreon tiers, buy books and sign up for mailing lists,…

> I think a true fan only applies to creative works that people consume for the sake of enjoyment.

I don't have the numbers but I'm sure only a few topseller authors make a lot of money, while there is a long tail of writers that live near poverty.

Re: 1k True Fans (2008)

#120

Post by amelius »

noduerme wrote: post #89
JKCalhoun wrote: post #39

Maybe some of you know of Dave Bull: the Caucasian Canadian that took a shine to Japanese woodblock carving (Ukiyo-e printmaking). I have pondered his "business model". Apparently the master Japanese carvers were loathe to take this gangly gaijin seriously when he began his obsession decades ago. And yet, Dave set for himself some insane goal of carving 100 wood blocks for prints over the space of a decade. Now as a…

Almost every great artist seems to invent the self-control to do this, whether it's writing 5 pages a day or waking up early to paint, in many cases as a response to the ennui and disintegration of an overabundance of unstructured freedom. I'm not one of those guys because it's really difficult to reshape your life into that structure.. But all it really requires is willpower. For me, concentration of that level only…

> For me, concentration of that level only comes into play when I'm fascinated by a difficult problem... it can't be applied to mundane small incremental daily progress.

What if that difficult problem requires more than one day to solve? (E.g. most research problems?)

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