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1000 True Fans? Try 100

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Re: 1000 True Fans? Try 100

#11

Post by hnick »

It's of course easy to prove if you define the nebulous 'true fans' as 'fan enough so that $X from each of them support me financially'.

I'm not against the idea but I know some creatives who operate in spaces where asking $1k a year is a tough sell. I don't think many people are paying that for knitting or gardening lessons even from the best but hey, maybe I'm wrong.

It makes sense for skills that can be monetised into a career. A cake decorator I know said the risk is that you're training your replacements (but she also said you might as well, or someone else will).

Re: 1000 True Fans? Try 100

#12

Post by GuiA »

chongli wrote: post #8
Proziam wrote: post #3

IIRC the 1k true fans idea was walked back by its original author after they got feedback from industry folks describing how the model was basically impossible to implement in the real world. This holds 100% true to my experience in influencer marketing and esports. Monetizing fans is really hard on passion alone. You need to create valuable calls to action and continuously produce content in order to maintain their…

It really is a buyer’s market in the attention economy. Viewers are fickle and it’s easy to jump ship if your preferred personality goes in a different direction. Same goes for TV and video games. There’s just so much stuff being made constantly. It’s trivial for viewers/players to switch to something else.

It’s a specialist’s market. Want to sell an FPS? Good luck getting noticed. Want to make games that only cater to chess players who are also into LISP programming? With a bit of work you can totally carve a niche for yourself.

Re: 1000 True Fans? Try 100

#13

Post by sytelus »

While this is well written, I would urge people to NOT to follow this advice. Subscriber churn is a real thing and losing $1000/yr subscriber hurts way more than losing $100/yr subscriber. Additionally, it takes an order of magnitude more effort for conversion and your product has to almost match the utility of a smartphone produced by $1T company to even demand that kind of automated recurring payments. The vast majority of fun creative content won't qualify for this anyway.

However, my bigger beef is with the subscriber model itself which somehow every person wants to impose for their next product. The fact is that it is much easier to convince me to pay $10 to get a new release instead of forcing on me $10/yr subscription. The subscription should be optional merely provided as a convenience to the customers who find themselves paying you again and again, not as requirement to use your product. This is a true customer-obsessed point of view. If you have something good to sell, make at least part of it free so people know the value to expect. Rest make it one-time fee and create your upgrades/releases appealing enough so people buy them recurringly!

Re: 1000 True Fans? Try 100

#14

Post by Reedx »

chongli wrote: post #8
Proziam wrote: post #3

IIRC the 1k true fans idea was walked back by its original author after they got feedback from industry folks describing how the model was basically impossible to implement in the real world. This holds 100% true to my experience in influencer marketing and esports. Monetizing fans is really hard on passion alone. You need to create valuable calls to action and continuously produce content in order to maintain their…

It really is a buyer’s market in the attention economy. Viewers are fickle and it’s easy to jump ship if your preferred personality goes in a different direction. Same goes for TV and video games. There’s just so much stuff being made constantly. It’s trivial for viewers/players to switch to something else.

Yeah, plus you have to contend with power laws. Most sales or attention is concentrated in the top ~10 and then drops off rapidly with a long skinny tail. You see this with the top selling books, apps, movies, games and things like Twitter followers as well.

Twitch viewership[1] is a realtime example showing this kind of distribution. The top handful always dominate.

1. https://www.twitch.tv/directory

Re: 1000 True Fans? Try 100

#15

Post by factsaresacred »

The 1000 fans concept is mostly about gratitude - 'thanks, keep doing what you're doing'.

The 100 fans idea seems to be mostly about expectation - 'I gave you money, now deliver this'.

The article describes customers not fans. The VC'ing of 1000 true fans.

Nevertheless it's great to see an Internet where growing numbers of people are willing to pay individuals for value and have the means to do so.

Re: 1000 True Fans? Try 100

#17

Post by busterarm »

sytelus wrote: post #13

While this is well written, I would urge people to NOT to follow this advice. Subscriber churn is a real thing and losing $1000/yr subscriber hurts way more than losing $100/yr subscriber. Additionally, it takes an order of magnitude more effort for conversion and your product has to almost match the utility of a smartphone produced by $1T company to even demand that kind of automated recurring payments. The vast maj…

Do both instead. Do something where you can offer tiers. Group lessons (100/yr subscribers) vs Individualized (1000/yr).

Re: 1000 True Fans? Try 100

#18

Post by Proziam »

Reedx wrote: post #14
chongli wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is a buyer’s market in the attention economy. Viewers are fickle and it’s easy to jump ship if your preferred personality goes in a different direction. Same goes for TV and video games. There’s just so much stuff being made constantly. It’s trivial for viewers/players to switch to something else.

Yeah, plus you have to contend with power laws. Most sales or attention is concentrated in the top ~10 and then drops off rapidly with a long skinny tail. You see this with the top selling books, apps, movies, games and things like Twitter followers as well. Twitch viewership[1] is a realtime example showing this kind of distribution. The top handful always dominate. 1. https://www.twitch.tv/directory

Twitch is an extremely imbalanced platform in regard to discoverability. Their model is to 'make the big bigger' and monetize a narrow field of creators well, rather than monetize a larger pool of creators. There are a number of valid criticisms of the platform, but this one is the most painful for new creators to contend with by a wide margin.

It also sucks for advertisers looking to work directly with those creators because it narrows the field of creators large enough to work with. Plus it inflates their viewership with users that may be less suitable for targeting.

Re: 1000 True Fans? Try 100

#19

Post by sytelus »

busterarm wrote: post #17
sytelus wrote: post #13

While this is well written, I would urge people to NOT to follow this advice. Subscriber churn is a real thing and losing $1000/yr subscriber hurts way more than losing $100/yr subscriber. Additionally, it takes an order of magnitude more effort for conversion and your product has to almost match the utility of a smartphone produced by $1T company to even demand that kind of automated recurring payments. The vast maj…

Do both instead. Do something where you can offer tiers. Group lessons (100/yr subscribers) vs Individualized (1000/yr).

I'd suggest not doing tiers. Segmentation is repulsive. Why do I ever want to be a bronze-level customer in your product world? It perhaps makes sense for products that have monopolized or established firmly or where costs are truely substantial as feature/utilization is increased. However, most likely is often the side effect of throwing in the MBA part of your brain to squeeze in that last bit of revenue juice without you having to improve the tech. In essence, just luring in customers with "low starting from..." prices and then telling them they are fools to expect those prices. I tend to distrust products that rely on segmentation to inflate revenues and I think they are often ripe for disruption. At least, for creative/educational products please don't tell your customers that they are 3rd class citizens in your world unless they allow you to completely squeeze them out.
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