
1,000 True Fans (2008) - pknerd
http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
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CM30
I think this 'true fan' thing can be summed up as the difference between two
types of creators/businesses, with one doing well on services like Patreon and
one not.

On the one hand, you've got creators whose fans like them for their branding
and personality, and whose fans often come under the 'true fan' label
described in the article. For these types of creators and businesses, getting
1000 of these fans is basically going to guarantee them a small but
potentially sustainable income stream for a lifestyle business or what not.

These are your artists, YouTubers, indie game developers, etc.

On the other hand, you've got the 'scale' type of business or service, which
offers products or services that fill a need without really banking on its own
branding or identity. These types of creators and businesses don't tend to
have 'true' fans, and become popular purely because their offerings are
convenient, cheap or basically mandatory in some way.

See also the likes of Walmart, McDonalds, the average bank or a utility
company. Or perhaps a generic service site online.

These would probably sink without a trace if they tried to live off Patreon or
similar services, and will basically have to keep competitors out of their
market or die.

And I suspect the former are probably in a better position in the long run,
especially in today's market.

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annywhey
Everything capable of hosting "true fans" has had someone take a crack at
industrializing the model at some point. That's how you get a Disney,
Nintendo, or Apple.

And the consequence of that is that it starves the room of oxygen for smaller
creators. A game from Nintendo might not quite the right game for you, but the
broad appeal and polish ultimately leads you to spend $60 and 60 hours playing
it instead of taking a risk on a few indies. And so it goes with everything
that tries to operate against bigger firms. You have to overcome the framing
of risk and price sensitivity and replace it with something truly unique that
overcomes low awareness. When the business is globalized that can be a really
tall order.

~~~
CM30
True, it's possible to industrialise the model. The difference between the two
types isn't purely based on the size of the business/creator, since as
mentioned the likes of Disney/Nintendo/Apple have true fans in spades and
there are small sites/YouTube channels/shops that have no brand to speak of
and compete purely on price or convenience.

But the difference is that if say Nintendo were small, they could probably
still at least keep going with a few thousand fans, whereas a failing business
going the Walmart/Amazon route would likely fold quite quickly.

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gwern
Ever since the rise of Patreon, I've thought this seemed especially prescient.

~~~
nickjj
Patreon is interesting to me because it's typically linked to from Youtube.

I know some Youtubers who have close to a million subscribers and over 250
million views on their channel but they have like 100 Patreon subscribers and
make $300 / month from it.

Really goes to show you how hard it is to get those 1,000 true fans on some
platforms, and that having those fans won't necessarily put you into a "I've
made it!" situation depending on where they came from.

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HiroshiSan
I really enjoyed this article, I feel like a great book that dives deeper into
the true fan methodology is The Four Steps to the Epiphany, as well as The
Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Early adopters are by definition true fans.

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evbogue
If only the world had worked out this way. In the meantime, let's build a
distributed social network to impoverish FAANG.

