True Fans

The idea of true fans comes from Kevin Kelly¹’s essay entitled ”1,000 True Fans”; I first became aware of the idea while reading Tribes by Seth Godin.

A true fan is someone who cares deeply about you and your work, and is willing to put in effort to support you. If the goal is to generate a livable wage off of your creative work, then the average person needs, at the time of writing, about $100,000 per year coming in to do so².

Kelly outlines a few required criteria for 1,000 true fans to be enough:

1. You need to create enough that you can make $100 in profit from each person. What you create has to be good enough that they’re willing to part with their money to support you.
2. The connection must be direct; they must pay you, not another company. A music label will keep most of the profit.

Footnotes

1. How much money did a two-letter domain name cost him?! ↩

2. $100,000/year will fluctuate depending on where you live, what your lifestyle expectations are, inflation, and countless other factors. ↩