“100 True Fans” is All You Need in Passion Economy
Learn how you can make a living off your passion in the growing creator economy.
What if we tell you that small is the new big? What if your business as a creator depended on reaching the niche rather than creating for the masses? Difficult to accept, right? However, the new wave of passion economy or creator economy is just about that.
Passion economy is a reform that has been waiting to happen for over decades now. The ability to pursue one’s passion as a full-time role and make money off of it has been a dream that was a far-reach for most of us. With passion economy, creators from across disciplines can scale their business exponentially. So much so, that this reform is now responsible for the new wave of creativepreneurs.
But how would one go about it? How will it be possible to reach a group of people with a vested interest in one’s work? And even if we chart a way to crack the TG, how will one market the experiences, knowledge, and creations that they have to offer?
Well, the answer is as easy as putting two and two together. It’s with the help of 100 True Fans.
When it comes to selling our work online, we are naturally compelled to believe that generating a mass interest is going to further our business. But that’s not always the case. It’s great to think big, especially when it comes to communities. However, the growth is not dependent on the number of community members.
Who Is A True Fan?
A true fan is defined by their loyalty. They are the ones who believe in you and your process. They are a staunch supporter of your creation and your longstanding pillars. For a musician, these fans are the ones who are the first in line to buy the tickets for their concert. For writers, they are the ones who will pre-order the books. At times, even go a step further to create fan-made trailers of their upcoming novels.
About a decade ago, Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired, proposed that a creator would need just 1,000 vested fans to make a decent living through the internet. He suggested that instead of chasing a wide-spread celebrity, all a creator needed was to work on reaching a modest audience of 1,000 people. These 1,000 people will buy anything you create or sell. In this scenario, if each one of these true fans invested ₹100 in you, you’ll be able to amass a value of ₹1,00,000.
We say that you do not need to worry about 1,000 true fans, as only 100 are enough to row your boat.
100 True Fans Is All You Need
As the passion economy grows, more people are beginning to monetize what they love. The current social media platforms have made the digital consumer more comfortable with the idea of going online to find what they want. The mass adoption of the influencer model is proof of this. This has led to an overall shift in the threshold of success.
Now instead of finding 1,000 true fans who’d pay ₹100, you need to focus on reaching a 100 who will add ₹1,000 each. This is because today, creators can efficiently make more money from fewer fans. It may sound unlikely, but this is already happening. The victory of creator-first platforms like Teachable over the last two years is concrete evidence of this shift.
The concept of 100 fans putting in ₹1,000 is not intended to be the benchmark. This is just to give a framework of how selling in the passion economy works. This calculator will help put things in perspective.
How Does It Change Things?
Often the creators get sidetracked from their vision when trying to reach the masses. If growing your career was about reaching a select few, your approach would be different. You’d focus more on the quality of offerings and will invest more time in cultivating long-term relationships.
You will probably fall back to them for feedback and tweak your offerings accordingly. This in turn will help you build a tight-knit community where every community member shares a bond with the other.
The good thing is when you cater to a connected tribe, you will be able to generate goodwill and positive word of mouth. This in turn will help you grow your audience and the number of true fans.
The focus of concentrating on 100 true fans is to aim at getting one day’s wage from them. Now all you want to do is, please them in a way that they support your one day’s labor. This sounds like a tough thing to accomplish, but it is not difficult.
How To Earn These Super Fans?
When you are monetizing through 100 true fans, you are not relying on patronage or donations. You should be working towards building content that adds value to the life of your fans. In this case, the value becomes the product.
The model of 100 super fans relates to Daniel Pink’s concept of intrinsic movement. The fans are driven by autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy assigns the urge of directing one’s life. Mastery is fuelled by the desire of getting substantially better at important things. The purpose is the yearning that rotates the wheels of greater service.
1. The Value Of Value Addition
The creator’s work here is to help their patron (100 true fans) through a range of ROI-positive services. In the traditional setting, this was known as self-help. Self-help or wellness is constructive, and in an offline world, this is where people seek experts. Hence, the first thing that you should consider while working on this model, is value-addition.
2. Not All Fans Are The Same
The next step is to view your fans or patrons as individual entities. Rather than serving a uniform set of people the same thing, seek subsegments. These subsegments can be categorized based on affinity and willingness to pay. You can try offering tailored services at comfortable prices. To decide this, you can group your fans and reach them through newsletters or emails to tell them about your offerings.
3. Use Your Social Following
If you already have a social following, you can try converting some of them to one-time purchasers. Once the first-time purchasers get familiar with your work, you can then try to convert some of them into high-paying super-fans.
The concept of 100 True Fans comes across as very lucrative. But before you decide to ride this wave, we suggest you evaluate your engagement. Creators who have a big number of followers, often see diffuse engagement and weaker alliances. In such a case, building your work around 100 True Fans may require a lot of heavy lifting. For creators who already enjoy the trust of a niche, this model will prove very efficient in driving their business in the passion economy.
At GoSocial, we are building the stack of tools that any creator would need to turn their passion into money. Sign up for the creator stack by GoSocial here: https://about.gosocial.io/creators
