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 dabbling artist myself, I simply can't imagine laying out my artistic landscape for the next couple of years, let alone the next decade. That shows a serious dedication and vision. And so he proceeded.
Well, after the first year and 10 prints or so, he got a handful of customers that began to buy up his prints. And to be sure, by replicating some of the designs of the great masters of history, he was learning a lot about Japanese woodblock carving.
I don't recall if he said how much he money he made the first year, but I believe calling him a starving artist would not have been a stretch. But nonetheless he continued.
The second year and another 10 prints and more patrons. It turns out that people that buy these sort of things, fine art prints, often collect them and will become repeat customers. No doubt there comes to be a stable of customers that are effectively subscribers and will henceforth buy everything he creates.
Going into the third and fourth years he can start to predict a lower threshold for what he will make as an artist in the coming years since he can more or less assume his regular customers will buy everything he prints in those years (and his work is no doubt getting better with each block he carves and learns from).
And of course the collector-type customers keep arriving as he and his work become better known — and so his business snowballs with more subscribers.
By the time Dave finished his decade-long goal he could comfortably call himself a professional wood block carver, no longer a novice but had now taken the vows so to speak.
Dave seems to have figured out the way to make a career out of art. I applaud him for that — brilliant. 10 fans became 100 became 1000 and then more.
Dave Bull says that, begrudgingly perhaps, some of the Japanese carvers began to at least then acknowledge him after his ten year carving odyssey.
He started a YouTube channel since then and it has really caught on — perhaps surprisingly as the field of artisans practicing traditional Japanese wood block carving has apparently been in decline. Dave has said that privately a few carvers have reached out to him to tell him that Dave is doing what they should have been doing all along.
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 — through a popular medium.
Having watched Dave's streams on Twitch, it seems to me that he has been able to adapt to the medium as they've come along through his career. Originally he appeared on broadcasts on Canadian television, moving on to YouTube in more recent times, and now has been consistently streaming on Twitch for a couple of years.
In all his output, you can see so clearly how passionate he is about Japanese printmaking. It's incredibly infectious. Commenters on his stream take on and share that passion, especially in his show-and-tell sections where you wait to see him reveal, discuss, and get very excited about new prints he has purchased (usually off of Yahoo).
Having recently read Van Gogh's letters, I saw a similar thing. His popularity really stems from his sister in law, Johanna, making them available after his death. He exuded passion (to the extreme!) about art and was tenacious in expressing that to his Brother in letters. However, he also made a clear decision point in his life (At ~27/28 years old) that art was going to be his primary focus.
I think that dedication combined with sharing that passion with others is what really makes some artists stand out. Ideally, doing both while still alive so you don't have to depend on your brother the whole time!
I think that's what make's Dave special. He has certainly mastered this.
(I'm sure he would hate being compared to Van Gogh though, so I apologise to him for that)
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 comes into play when I'm fascinated by a difficult problem... it can't be applied to mundane small incremental daily progress.
But maybe if I set my sleep and wake alarms differently...
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.
I think you are being overly unkind to yourself. It could be that the people who become great artist learn this, but it's also possible they just won the genetic lottery in terms of brain chemistry.
Beating yourself up by comparing yourself to people like that won't make you like them, but it will severely distort your self image and mental health.
I guess. But I feel like it's only such a small amount of self control I lack to get me there. Maybe it's good to beat yourself up a bit, to remind yourself to have a goal that's almost in reach.
> 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?)
What's also interesting is that Dave himself can be called a true fan. That of Japanese traditional craftmanship. And actually the same applies to music - many great bands started as true fans of other bands. It's like making art and following art obsessively are interlinked.
This story reminds me of (how I imagine) the career of Connor Price looks like. Check him out on youtube. He makes so many tracks with so many people - and eventually things pick up. He could very well be the next Sheridan.
The 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.
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.
And yet I was miles ahead many other struggling artists and musicians that couldn't make a cent out of their craft. I was shrinking but what really forced me to stop and start to learn a programming language was the pandemics (that's how I learned about HN btw).
More like a hobby yes. If you ask me if I would try to make a living out of it again, then I'm not sure (probably not). The feeling of not making a single cent for a few months in the beginning of the pandemic was a bit traumatic.
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.
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.
But don’t let the 1k number fool you. Getting even 1 true fan is incredibly difficult.
That’s what is great about 1k. The degree to which you need to scale is reasonable if you find a large enough niche - and they number of niches where scaling your 1k true fans is large.
Doesn’t make it easy, but doubling the number of people who love what you create is tractable.
This idea reminds me of something I've read on some old blog post about enterpreneurship.
So, the guys starting the company were excited, because they said "We know the odds are small, but we don't need much, if just 1 in 1000 buys our product we're rich, as that's like 350K people in the US. And how difficult would be to get 1 in 1000 to buy our stuff with a little marketing? It's a great product anyway! Heck, if just 1 in 10,000 buys our product, that's still 35K sales, enough to bootstrap the company and make some decent profit! And 1 in 10,000 should be trivial!"
Ultimately, though the message the author of the post got from that business plan failing miserably, is that there's always the posibility of 0 in 1000 buying their product...
"Just get 1000 true fans" downplays the difficulty.
If you read their definition of a true fan they sound like borderline insane
>A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month.
It might be borderline insane but it might fit a lot of people that are on Twitch.
I prefer content creators with a small viewership. They are often more interesting to watch than some creator with thousands of viewers and if you really want to interact with the content creator, you don't get drowned out by the flood of chat messages that comes with thousands of viewers.
You'd think that a content creator with only a handful of viewers is all on their own but I've seen so many of them with mods that are doing work for them for free and - even more important if we're looking for true fans - there are often viewers that gift random people subscriptions of this creator.
Since I've noticed I always wondered if getting one or true fans is not that hard after all. But scaling up is the actual difficult part.
The truth is that cultivating a thousand true fans is time consuming, sometimes nerve racking, and not for everyone. Done well (and why not do it well?) it can become another full-time job. At best it will be a consuming and challenging part-time task that requires ongoing skills.
I'd add now, mostly from unsuccessful experience, what does it take the first fan, and then the next one, and the one after that? For a lot of people, it's still some version of and then magic happens.
Bonus true story: I worked for an economic consulting/data/analytical software timesharing firm in the early '80s. They could see that PCs were going to be a huge threat, so they tried to sell "data kits". For instance (and I'm making up the numbers), for $50 you could buy a download of 10 years of GDP data or similar.
Their market logic was: if we just get 1% of the PC market, we'll be rich.
Hundreds of creators creating content for these platforms, want to know the average rating is Five Stars. Want to know the average viewership? ~100, to even get to the stage of generating money you need to create several hundred chapters, and essentially beat the system to even make a hundred dollars.
For most of them, they will quit writing after their first series doesn't pick up traction, most don't understand the formula and strategy, most dont have the time or money to try.
Average viewership for light novels reaching 30~ chapters is less than a few thousand meaning which might seem like a lot, but it's not. From there viewership gets lower and lower. It's all based on demand and the only thing people want to read is porn.
As an artist, I appreciate the statement because it reminds me to appropriately scope what tiers of “success” can mean.
I have zero illusions about the ease of convincing 1000 people to trade their money for works I’ve produced. But 1000 people is a small enough number that I can conceive of in my minds eye and then plan concrete steps to try to make it happen.
> "Just get 1000 true fans" downplays the difficulty.
While I agree it downplays the difficulty, I think the point is you shouldn't be focusing on getting millions of followers, which most people assume is the goal.
You don't need a million followers (or more), you just need some (about 1000) who really care about you and your products/services.
Yeah, that would be exactly it! It changed into my memory into a product-related (as opposed to CD-related) blog post, but I recognized it immediately (and used to read Derek's blog back in the day)
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 revenue you generated or money you saved). Paradoxically, it's easier to charge lots of money vs. convince lots of people to give you a little bit of money. If you don't believe me, I encourage you to run a time-boxed experiment where you attempt to do both for 1 month. Post your findings to HackerNews!
This might seem more boring compared to 1,000 fans (1,000 people who follow you is a great dopamine hit), but it's also much easier!
> 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 revenue you generated or money you saved)
this is fantasyland pricing. the reality is that
1) its often very hard to know how much revenue or expense improvement was directly attributable to your thing and people will err against you. you often need to be in the ballpark of 10x better than the “hire someone to do it in house” option.
2) people will look at comparables for pricing and it is very hard (not impossible) to charge above your peers no matter what business value you provide. if you have the audacity to claim, as many do, that you have no peers, then good luck convincing a remotely critical person that you should be paid for your service rather than you paying them for using their time for your market research .
i'm all for encouraging people but dont give unrealistic expectations on how hard it is to create and sell b2b software please.
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.
It depends. There can be several benefits of selling to businesses (based on experience):
- You may only need to be responsive to customers during business hours. Of course this changes when you sell globally.
- User-facing upgrades (new features) are not necessarily expected. They might be perfectly content with the product as is, barring a few (hopefully low-priority) tweaks/bug fixes here and there.
- If businesses are dependent on your service for mission critical jobs and can hardly tolerate outages, charge them accordingly. They should be willing to support measures that ensure your continuity and reliability. This might enable you to hire others.
- If a business has trained its people to use your offering, or spent time integrating it, they are probably not going anywhere for many years. This is even more true with highly specialized software for which there is little or no competition. This means once you have reached your threshold of customers, you shouldn't have to invest much time in acquiring new customers if you don't want to.
On the other hand, I would never become dependent on a solo developer or a small business for a critical part of my business.
I’ve been on both sides of the issue. I worked for a struggling startup that got one large customer who was 80% of our revenue. They insisted on the code being put in escrow and released to them under certain conditions.
When the company was sold for scraps, they exercised that clause and hired me as a contractor to help them transition.
On the other side, I was the dev lead at a company who was looking at using the software of a solo developer as a critical component to our business. I suggested the same clauses be a stipulation to us signing the contract. We were going to be 80% of his business.
IF the goal is to just make money, way easier ways than fans/friends altogether. Get an office job; unsexy but it pays better. Even some blue collar jobs can pay better.
Oh sure, building a SaaS business that generates $100k is harder than getting a job that pays $100k. The key question is: what is the difference in difficulty, and does it justify the incremental benefit of generating a self-sufficient income stream, rather than a one-time payment?
How difficult do you think it is for any developer to get a $100K job in any major city in the US?
My “self sufficient income stream” comes from always being employable and having a strong network.
Back in 2012, the company I worked for was struggling. Guess how much sleep I lost? I saved money and when layoffs happened, I called some recruiters and literally had another offer in less than a week.
That’s close to my experience since 1996 across 8 jobs. Admittedly until the current one, most of them were uninspiring CRUD jobs at companies no one ever heard of
> My “self sufficient income stream” comes from always being employable and having a strong network.
The point is that an employee only gets paid as long as he clocks in. Once he turns in his badge, the paychecks cease. You have a self-sufficient way to remain employed (and in a high-paying field — this is great!), but that is not the same thing as generating passive income, which is what SaaS businesses aim to do.
One is not always better than the other, since it is harder to build a business than to just remain employed. But given the choice, most people would choose ongoing passive income to ongoing active employment.
And how is SaaS income “passive”? There is server support, sales, etc.
Guess how many days sleep I’ve ever lost worrying about “market fit” or customer acquisition or whether my little SaaS company would be eaten alive by a better funded competitor?
How many little SaaS companies even Net as much as the average new grad makes their first year at any tech company?
I personally gladly choose not to have the stress of starting my own business or independent consulting. Even though I have the skillset and experience and pedigree to do “cloud consulting”. I have a whole organization full of lawyers, accountants, sales people, on call technical support so I can just wait for the next assignment.
If I have an issue with an AWS service that I can’t solve, I just post my question to an internal Slack channel and one of the developers of the service answer my question.
> And how is SaaS income “passive”? There is server support, sales, etc.
It surely depends on your market, but things like sales are for generating new income. You can always stop working on sales and keep drawing existing income. I don't know how much server support most SaaS businesses entail, but in my (n = 1) experience, it's not a lot.
I"m a little confused by your reference to independent consulting, which is not at all like SaaS. It has more flexibility than full-time employment, but it's still active income that you have to work for (with a minor exception for retainers).
But it sounds like you aren't really interested in finding a way that passive income could be useful, and I'm not here to list all the reasons people like to run SaaS businesses. If the benefits don't stand out to you, then by all means you should do something else!
Or better yet, one employer. Go follow Dan Luu's advice and educate/train/practice yourself into the top 10% of software developers, then get a FAANG job. That's the surest path to financial security and a safe, comfy upper middle class lifestyle.
But if you don't want to go just be an employee and beholden to one employer, then keep that line of reasoning going and you'll see that 1,000,000 casual listeners > 100,000 sh*t fans > 10,000 mediocre fans > 1,000 true fans > 100 scary stalker fans > 10 b2b customers > 1 employer/patron.
You don’t have to be in the top 10% of developers to get hired. You just have to be willing and able to pass DS&A interview. The two skill sets are miles apart.
Before the gatekeeping starts. Yes I work for “a FAANG”. Yes I am (was?) a software developer. No I did not do a single coding interview to get here yet I code everyday.
I didn't say any of that, in fact I referred to Dan Luu here so that people would get the shorthand (Luu family has written that DS&A coding and whiteboard interviews are not predictive). The only reason you're picking this apart is that you're confusing necessary and sufficient conditions as well as confusing sufficing and optimizing. Either way you're not responding to the substantive point: that if you're optimizing for an expectation of regular high income rather than creative freedom, employment (being dependent on one entity) is the path. But if you want creative freedom, a large number of people that like your work a little is better than being beholden to ten business or 1000 devoted big spender fans.
> I'd argue that if you're smart enough to be reading this website...
I would agree that the average IQ (or potential in general) of the HN readers is more than that of the general population, but I disagree there is any minimum threshold here in any capacity that warrant your statement. Many readers here can't code at all, or couldn't learn to well enough to build and market software.
If you're reading this and can't code (yet), the pressure of delivering something real is an effective way to learn!
You can also accomplish a remarkable breadth of tasks with no/low-code tools, to the point where you don't need to be a software engineer to build an MVP and start charging money to validate.
Take a swing (and keep swinging even after you've struck out - you'll hit something eventually, and it'll feel great)
I wouldn't say being able to code is a requirement to build and market software these days. You could get decently far just glueing together libs in Js/Py until VC funding.
Meh. If you're smart enough to read this web site you should find someone else to leverage some equity out of and a good salary and ride it to IPO then retire and do something else.
Yes because if you’re so smart , you should be able to pick the one out of 10 startups that don’t outright fail - something that VCs can’t do - and then join the company early enough to get decent equity (where you statistically have even less of a chance of choosing the right horse) and then choose the company out of the ones that don’t outright fail that have an outsized exit event.
Yeah, do what, exactly... Dawdle around dabbling in random stuff, only to eventually get bored and return to tech for making an impact on something and changing the world...
Friends, family, books, movies, games, food, travel, hobbies, more hobbies, coding stuff that's fun instead of merely profitable...
Most people only work so they can support those things in their off hours. There's a thousand things I could occupy a happy lifetime with if I didn't have to work.
May I ask if anyone is aware what type of businesses to target? SMB?
I always thought enterprise has super long sale cycles and won't trust a new product easily ( more decision makers) but to get 10 businesses to pay $833 wouldn't that need enterprise customers not SMB?
This is tough to give general advice for, because you'll want to tap your personal strengths. Here's a great talk by Jason Cohen, if you're trying to design a bootstrapped business. He even mentions the 1,000 true fans goal as being unrealistic compared to a handful of high-paying customers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw
Happy to brainstorm though. Here's a few questions to get the ball rolling:
What're 2-3 things that people have come to you to learn?
What are the 3 problems that are top-of-mind for the person who signs your paychecks?
What are the top 3 sources of revenue for your current employer? How much is from expansion revenue (existing customers paying more over time) vs. new logos?
Besides the all-in cost of personnel (salary, payroll taxes, health insurance, etc), what are the top expenses of your current employer?
Follow the money! Once you start digging into how a company earns and spends money, you'll find ways to add revenue or reduce spend w/ software.
Below a certain threshold a Sales cycle length is driven by price, not customer size. I’ve sold a $300 a month SaaS product to Fortune 500 companies like Target and Apple, as well as smaller sized companies with 50-100 people. Pretty much $500 or less a frontline manager can put it on their corporate AMEX and the sales cycle was similar length (1-2 weeks)
Above a certain deal size company type does matter. I was recently invoked with two deals, both around $20K a year. One was to a medium sized company and it closed in about a month. The other was the same amount but with a large enterprise, and that took about 10 weeks, because legal had to be involved. The security team had to be involved, we had to get added as an approved vendor, etc
> 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.
I gave up a Software Engineering career to become a content creator (Instagram/Blog/YouTube/magazine articles/photography/speaking/books), so I can offer my first hand experience.
What you say is, more or less, on the money. I would absolutely be earning more cash if I stuck at my software career. I willingly put my hand in the air and said "I don't want more money, I want a different life."
I realized that sitting inside every day was not the life I wanted to live, so I changed it. I don't want "an easier" way to make money, I don't want to sit and write software. I learned that doesn't make me happy.
I'm passionate about exploring the world and telling stories about that, so that is what I do now, and I love it. Yes, I have a lot less money than I used to have, and I'm much happier. Monetizing this life has been an incredible learning experience, and I'm proud of what I have achieved to date.
For me personally, life is not about finding an "easier way" to make money. It's not about how comfortable my life is, and it's not about simply having more money. So I choose this life. And, well, also The Road Chose Me.
> 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.
it's both fascinating and horrifying to think through reasons this doesn't happen, the many complications that get between raw ability/acumen/interest and such straightforward outcomes!
I'm curious thinking about this. I'm a very strong researcher, mild-moderate software developer, and absolutely gridlock terrified of contracts, formalities, getting locked into commitments, etc.
Like, I think I could do it, but I'm on the autism spectrum so my budget for variance is _so_ much lower. I highly downbudget things in my life that are higher variance so I look more neurotypical a lot of the time but sometimes with unavoidable stuff I get very much the more classical autism negative stuff (meltdowns, subtle meltdowns, shutdowns (!!!), a host of destimming and de-stressing mechanisms, etc).
I guess that's the thing I'm concerned about. Any field I can eventually become comfortable in once I know the different situations and how to leave the bad ones/find the good ones/have healthy strategies that personally work for me for my worst case scenarios/etc. The main problem is that I don't have the 5-10 years to really sink into that comfortably to get there from raw experience, or the stamina to go through what would seem to be my own personal hell in the meantime.
I could be totally wrong so I'm up for learning (especially if there are resources that are specifically adaptive to autism &etc -- it helps a lot!). I could see how this all could be a good thing in a different light with a different set of strategies.
> The main problem is that I don't have the 5-10 years to really sink into that comfortably to get there from raw experience, or the stamina to go through what would seem to be my own personal hell in the meantime.
you've described a very difficult situation. i wish i had concrete advice for progressing with it.
you do seem to have a strong sense of your weaknesses and strengths though.
off the top of my head, perhaps developing some kind of SaaS such that you can deal with clients in a very algorithmic way / purely by API, would suit you best? as opposed to dealing with per client contracts/formalities...
sorry, i wish i had better advice and/or perspective for your situation.
> you can name your price (as long as it's below the amount of revenue you generated or money you saved).
Incremental gross profit, not incremental revenue, would be a better reference as the ceiling (and even that’s high for a stable business, who might use net profit as the reference figure for their reservation price).
There’s at least one person who recently put in much more effort than you recommend into making money on the internet who has failed miserably. See original discussion below.
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.
Every 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.
This essay has it all around backwards. 1k true fans is a recipe for destroying your own creative life and devoting most of your time to sales funnel building, fomo emails and clickbait offers and bribes for mailing list signups, running ads, etc. The true fan who spends $100/year wants you to be their therapist and to belong to your tribe, will stalk you, will send you unsolicited emails offering advice, etc. Don't hunt the whales.
It's better to aim for constantly increasing quality, and with the ease of reaching many people with modern technology, find some combination of your 10,000 mediocre fans willing to give you $10/year, 100,000 sh*t fans getting you $1/year. You put out music or writing or art for these fans, they spend a very reasonable amount on it per year without upsetting the household budget, they think of you occasionally but you o random creator are not constantly 'top of mind' for them and they can think about their friends and/or family and/or day-to-day work instead. And you aren't babysitting their feelings or constantly begging them for money.
B2B can be even worse, you're support, therapist, babysitter all the time. They pay you big bucks and think they own you. If you don't have enough customers, maybe they do. 1000k true fans, you're responding to emails all the time, trying to look cool on socials, sticking calls to action in every video or email. ~$10, these people are buying a print or an album or a t-shirt or a book once a year, ~$1 they're streaming your songs a couple hundred times a year. They've got a normal 'someone who makes something I like' relationship with you, you're not some big fan. You're not supporting your product, hopefully you're spending your time making the next thing you want to make.
Someone will probably jump in and yell about how you won't get to those numbers of meh fans without someone recommending you. Yeah, that's right -- but with quality people and algorithms will recommend you because of the _thing you made_, not because you took them on a customer journey from browser to fan to friend with your relentless hustle.
As someone making music, there's nothing better than the spotify algorithms recommending my music to people while I sleep and spending the creative time that I have making music and not marketing campaigns. Or production music I made showing up in netflix shows I love despite me never having been yelled at by a director. YMMV.
Judging from how much people spend on streamers/entertainers/gambling I think you can get a lot more than $100/yr out of people before they think they own you. That’s the price of getting one YouTube superchat read in a popular channel, though the way it’s publicly visible changes things.
It does mean you tend to produce content that gets you the superchats rather than what you want to do. And that’s probably not writing a tech book.
Yes, it produces content that baits your audience into keeping you top of mind and showing up to hang out with you when the email comes through, feeling FOMO if they don't join the hype train, etc. (a large share of which just goes to twitch). And yes, it follows the old 'get them drunk then put pressure on them to part them with their money' gambling and adult entertainment venue path. Is that a fulfilling creative life? Compared to consistently making the highest quality things you want to make that some small percent of the population likes, then earning passive income through royalties on it indefinitely?
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 that one of the 18 followers he had on YouTube was Oprah Winfrey's hair stylist, and Oprah was talking to her about this project she was trying to get started, and the stylist mentioned this one YouTube account she loved who was all about that topic, and the rest is history.
Every single person who watches your video is a unique human individual, and magic can happen from just one spark, from just one person!
Does anyone have any suggestions where I could go looking for fans? I'm making a text editor/game where you write text documents with tentacle arms. Learn ritual magic based on what you write / activate machines by writing.
I've got about 1400 followers on twitter, had a few semi-successful posts on reddit. Tiktok did less well. My weathervane is currently pointed towards doing more on YouTube. Enough people have downloaded the demo on steam that a few novels worth of text has probably been written with it, so that's fun. I'm not at a point where I can discern my count of who is a _true fan_, but there's probably a few in there.
In order to extend the runway of a self funded solo development text editor rpg game, I moved into a barn. The upload from my martian rover rusty can antenna is not sufficient for live streaming, however, I can wait several revolutions of the daystar for asynchronous uploads.
Starlink was supposed to be my enabler and savior, but Elon betrayed us because my barn isn't a boat or a plane I guess. My easily accessible options are youtube/twitter/reddit/ + light a candle for twitch someday.
You will want to go where people already hang around. There are many sites where people interested in some topic are constantly refreshing the page looking for something interesting/helpful/useful/entertaining/etc. Find those places, help as many people as you can, and build a name for yourself there.
The mindset here strikes me as the social-media/content parallel of "solution in search of a problem". If you're looking for money: You should focus on making content you know there is demand for, ideally with customers lined up to pay and/or distribution channel deals. The fundamentals here are the same as for any business.
If you're making content creatively you should be ready doing that without financial compensation.
This influencer-hustle mindset is not helpful and a distraction for both approaches. Get your priorities straight.
Am I the only one who thinks the 'true fan' definition is a bit... icky? If I have a person who buys everything I offer, regardless of if it's a duplicate of something I already offered earlier, regardless of quality, that person sounds like they put me on way too much of a pedestal. I'd rather have fans that go 'nah, this ain't worth it, I ain't buying' when I send out something that's dog shit. The 'true fan' definition on offer sounds a bit too stalker-y to me.
It can bring with it the anxiety of living up to their expectations. This is present for big celebs too, but in this case the pressure is amplified because you are kind of close to these 1000 or so guys, and they pay you.
My friend showed me a cool series of photography books he'd backed on Kickstarter called Vanishing Asia. Only after we'd finished flipping through them did I realize they were by Kevin Kelly. I just looked up the campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kk-org/vanishing-asia): 2,348 backers pledged $603,420 to help bring this project to life.
I wrote a phd, in part, on this (actually on crowdfunding for creatives, but this essay bookended the thesis). Writing in 2008 KK essentially predicted D2F crowdfunding built on e-mailing lists and facebook. He gets a lot right, and it stands up well - but, make no mistake, he describes a full-time job, and the "admin" involved is more than 50% of the effort. It's not for everyone, but it can work, and does for many. Anyone following this path should consider reading my paper on how your communication channels impact "sales"
https://www-sciencedirect-com.vu-nl.idm.oclc.org/science/art...
This 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.
And in 2022 you know that it doesn't work because you don't see any examples. Despite quite a few people trying to make a living from their fan base on various social media platforms. (Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) While if it did work, we should see a lot of these. But instead of the 1000 fans they need tens or hundreds of thousands usually. And even those don't pay.
Maybe it works on OnlyFans as someone mentioned. But that's a special market for a very a specific type of product/producers...
Oh, and we also have patreon to support fans paying the creators. But it doesn't look like the $100/patron/year model is a thing there. Or that too many people make $100k/year at all. https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators
In 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.
From a different perspective: How many skilled people are needed for 100 creative people?
How much of the $100,000 are circulated among creative people? If those transactions are ignored and we only look at the usage of skilled work, how much is needed?
There needs to be food, shelter, clothing, medical care, transportation, energy, etc. My guess would be that it takes 100 skilled people to supply 100 creative people.
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, or support indie games on kickstarter.
> I think a true fan only applies to creative works that people consume for the sake of enjoyment.
That was my thought, too. And not all creative works, either—rather, creative works where the personality and individuality of the creator are clearly expressed. The author lists “craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor” as examples of people who “need only thousands of true fans,” but the first six seem to me much more likely to attract long-term true fans than the last three.
I’m not sure if this falls under your definition of “technical books”, but Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial is an incredible example of a 1000 fans-esque type of (light) technical book.
That was started in 2010, and for a long time the online version was free (he made money from videos, pdfs, etc. He has since expanded his library. He has many fans, and makes quite a bit of money from his projects.
Just finished reading every comment on this. Full disclosure: After 18+ years publishing a daily blog I currently have one (1) paying fan. Every month via Ko-fi/Stripe he sends me $2, of which $1.64 is deposited into my bank account. And I'm fine with that.
I’ve never been a consisted blogger (i.e. weekly) and I haven’t setup a way to collect donations, but I get a lot of nice emails. Some of them even say I saved the user hundreds or thousands of dollars with my technical instructions.
Yeah, it’s hard to find your fans. But, it’s also on us to do so in some organized way. They aren’t going to donate if I don’t have a donate button.
Boy, you lasered right in on the crux of it: Long ago, back in August of 2004 when I started my blog, the guy who set it up for me asked if I wanted him to include a DONATE button. I said no way because it seemed — and still does — to me to be akin to begging, like people do who really need help.
Now, if I could've had a sort of line graph that said "Help me make my first million" where the endpoint was $1m and each little amount — even a penny — added would show up a là Million Dollar Homepage [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage], I'd have mos def done that.
I think that if one does something for a long time and with constant passion, and then reflects about that in the form of text, podcast or video - they are doomed to become an influencer of sorts. So your recommendation is equal to "do not reflect on your passion in public", which is quite sad.
This again? 1k true fans, like the 10k hours rule popularized by Gladwell or the Purple Cow by Godin, etc. sounds better on paper than in practice, but there are always caveats and major survivorship bias. Getting those 1k fans is quite hard, as it turns out, maybe impossible even though it's not that many on an absolute basis. According to Kevin Kelly, a true fan is more than just a Twitter follower or a Facebook like. It's someone who is a paying customer or will refer others.
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 dabbling artist myself, I simply can't imagine laying out my artistic landscape for the next couple of years, let alone the next decade. That shows a serious dedication and vision. And so he proceeded.
Well, after the first year and 10 prints or so, he got a handful of customers that began to buy up his prints. And to be sure, by replicating some of the designs of the great masters of history, he was learning a lot about Japanese woodblock carving.
I don't recall if he said how much he money he made the first year, but I believe calling him a starving artist would not have been a stretch. But nonetheless he continued.
The second year and another 10 prints and more patrons. It turns out that people that buy these sort of things, fine art prints, often collect them and will become repeat customers. No doubt there comes to be a stable of customers that are effectively subscribers and will henceforth buy everything he creates.
Going into the third and fourth years he can start to predict a lower threshold for what he will make as an artist in the coming years since he can more or less assume his regular customers will buy everything he prints in those years (and his work is no doubt getting better with each block he carves and learns from).
And of course the collector-type customers keep arriving as he and his work become better known — and so his business snowballs with more subscribers.
By the time Dave finished his decade-long goal he could comfortably call himself a professional wood block carver, no longer a novice but had now taken the vows so to speak.
Dave seems to have figured out the way to make a career out of art. I applaud him for that — brilliant. 10 fans became 100 became 1000 and then more.
Dave Bull says that, begrudgingly perhaps, some of the Japanese carvers began to at least then acknowledge him after his ten year carving odyssey.
He started a YouTube channel since then and it has really caught on — perhaps surprisingly as the field of artisans practicing traditional Japanese wood block carving has apparently been in decline. Dave has said that privately a few carvers have reached out to him to tell him that Dave is doing what they should have been doing all along.