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June 29 - July 23, 2020
To be a successful creator, you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, clients, or
fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only 1,000 true fans.
A true fan is defined as “a fan who will buy anything you produce.” These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audio 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; they will buy the superdeluxe reissued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name; they bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up;
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You need to meet two criteria: First, you have to create enough each year that you can earn, on average, $100 profit from each true fan. That is easier to do in some arts and businesses than others, but it is a good creative challenge in every area because it is always easier and better to give your existing customers more, than it is to find new fans. Second, you must have a direct relationship with your fans. That is, they must pay you directly. You get to keep all of their support, unlike the small percentage of their fees you might get from a music label, publisher, studio, retailer, or
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Pleasing a true fan is pleasurable and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that true fans appreciate.
Another way to calculate the support of a true fan is to aim to get one day of their wages per year. Can you excite or please them sufficiently to earn what they make from one day’s labor? That’s a high bar, but not impossible for 1,000 people worldwide.
Still, you want to focus on the superfans because the enthusiasm of true fans can increase the patronage of regular fans. True fans are not only the
direct source of your income, but also your chief marketing force for the ordinary fans.
In other words, the most obscure, under-selling book, song, or idea is only one click away from the best-selling book, song, or idea.
Whatever your interests as a creator are, your 1,000 true fans are one click from you. As far as I can tell there is nothing—no product, no idea, no desire—without a fan base on the Internet. Everything made or thought of can interest at least one person in a million—it’s a low bar. Yet if even only one out of a million people were interested, that’s potentially 7,000 people on the planet. That means that any 1-in-a-million appeal can find 1,000 true fans. The trick is to practically find those fans, or, more accurately, to have them find you.
The takeaway: 1,000 true fans is an alternative path to success other than stardom. Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum bestseller hits, blockbusters, and celebrity status, you can aim for direct connection with 1,000 true fans. On your way, no matter how many fans you actually succeed in gaining, you’ll be surrounded not by faddish infatuation, but by genuine and true appreciation. It’s a much saner destiny to hope for. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.
Kevin distinguishes between “making a living” and “making a fortune,” which is an important starting point for the discussion. However, it’s worth noting that these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. Creating 1,000 true fans is also how you create massive hits, perennial mega-bestsellers, and worldwide fame (be careful what you wish for). Everything big starts small and focused
1,000 true fans is step #1, whether you want a $100K per year business or the next Uber. I’ve seen this with all of my fastest-growing and most successful startups. They start laser-focused on 100 to 1,000 people, niche-ing down as necessary with their messaging and targeting (demographically, geographically, etc.) to get to a manageable and cost-effectively reachable number.
So, you may ask yourself, “Why aim for a mere $100K when I can try to build a billion-dollar business?” Two reasons: 1) Aiming for the latter from the outset often leads to neglecting the high-touch 1,000 true fans who act as your most powerful unpaid marketing force for “crossing the chasm” into the mainstream. If you don’t build that initial army, you’re likely to fail. 2) Do you really want to build and manage a big company? For most people, it’s not a fun experience; it’s an all-...
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You do not have to sacrifice the integrity of your art for a respectable income. You just need to create a great experience and charge enough.
Not sure what to charge? Perhaps you should figure out your Target Monthly Income (TMI) for your ideal lifestyle and work backward. For examples and a simple worksheet exercise, visit fourhourworkweek.com/tmi
If you add a + to the end of any bit.ly URL, you can see stats related to that link. For example: Here are stats for the shortlink Kickstarter generated for our campaign: http://kck.st/VjAFva+
[TF: This will blow your mind. Go to any Kickstarter project, click on Share, and pick a social network, like Twitter. A pre-populated tweet will appear with a shortlink. Copy and paste the link alone into a new tab, add + to the end, and hit Return. Voilà.]
TF: I personally use the SimilarWeb Chrome extension.
Identify Relationships on Facebook This may be the most important part of your PR efforts. For us, 8 out of 10 valuable blog posts resulted from relationships. When we pitched a blogger without a relationship, less than 1% even responded. With introductions, our success rate was over 50%. How do you identify relationships? Facebook. Have your VA log in to your Facebook account, search for bloggers in your media list, and add mutual friends to your spreadsheet. You can also search on professional networks like LinkedIn.
TextExpander allows you to paste any saved message—whether it’s a phone number or a two-page email—into any document or text field, simply by typing an abbreviation. This is extremely helpful for repetitive outreach. It’s a must-have app that probably saved us 1 to 2 hours a day in typing.
One tool that we did not use, but should have, is Boomerang, a Gmail plug-in that allows you to schedule emails. We crafted emails to our influencers and in-the-know friends the day of our launch, using TextExpander, then slightly customized each one. What we should have done is written and saved these personalized emails a few days before we launched. That way, we could have scheduled them to be automatically sent by Boomerang the second we launched. This would have freed up many valuable hours on launch day.
TF: For perhaps 10 additional tips, as well as a half dozen email templates that Soma used for their PR outreach and launch (this alone could save you more than 100 hours), visit fourhourworkweek.com/kickstarter
“Occasionally, a good idea comes to you first, if you’re lucky. Usually, it only comes after a lot of bad ideas.”
Questions
are your pickaxes. Good questions are what open people up, open new doors, and create opportunities.
“Often, there’s a very basic, very dumb question at the center of a story that no one’s asking. One of the biggest stories I ever did, ‘The Giant Pool of Money,’ was predicated on just such a dumb question: ‘Why are the banks loaning money to people who can’t possibly pay it back?’ Asking the right dumb question is often the smartest thing you can do.”
Prompts to Elicit Stories (Most Interviewers Are Weak at This) “Tell me about a time when . . .” “Tell me about the day [or moment or time] when . . .” “Tell me the story of . . . [how you came to major in X, how you met so-and-so, etc.]”
“Tell me about the day you realized ___ . . . ” “What were the steps that got you to ___ ?” “Describe the conversation when . . .”
Follow-Up Questions When Something Interesting Comes Up, Perhaps in Passing “How did that make you feel?” “What do you make of that?” TF: I will often say, “Explain that a bit more . . .” or “What did you learn from that?”
General-Use Fishing Lures “If the old you could see the new you, what would the new you say?” “You seem very confident now. Was that always the case?” “If you had to describe the debate in your head about [X decision or event], how would you describe it?” TF: I often adapt the last to something like “When you do X [or “When Y happened to you”], what does your internal self-talk sound like? What do you say to yourself?”
Field Recording Audio-Technica AT8035 shotgun microphone TASCAM DR-100mkII recorder Sony MDR-7506 headphones XLR cable(s)
Software Avid Pro Tools for editing Chartbeat for analytics
In-Person Interviews Zoom H6 6-track portable recorder: For in-person recording, I use the H6 with simple stage mics (below). For recording 2- to 4-person interviews, it’s better than the older H4n model. Pro tip: ALWAYS put in new batteries for every important interview. I use simple earbuds for sound checks.
Shure SM58-LC cardioid vocal microphone: Thanks to Bryan Callen (page 483) for introducing me to these. I’ve tried all sorts of fancy lavalier mics, booms, etc. For the money, nothing beats these old-school stage mics for in-person podcasting. You could throw them against a wall and they’d probably be fine. Some people use mic stands to hold them, but I do not. I prefer to have guests hold them, as they’re less likely to lean away. Sound levels (volume) are therefore more consistent, requiring less fussing in post-production. XLR 3-pin microphone cable (6 feet): To connect the Shure SM58-LC
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Post-Production and Editing Whatever: I edited perhaps 20 of my first 30 episodes using GarageBand, despite disliking it. Why? Because I could learn it quickly, and it forced me to keep the podcast format dead simple. Fancy nonsense wasn’t possible for a Luddite like me, nor for the software, and that’s what I wanted: a positive constraint. If GarageBand appears too amateur for your first 1 to 3 episodes, I’d bet money 99% of you will quit by episode 5. Most would-be podcasters quit because they get overwhelmed with gear and editing. Much like Joe Rogan, I decided to record and publish entire
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“This is the big misconception that people have, that [in the beginning] a new film is the baby version of the final film, when in fact the final film bears no relationship to what you started off with. What we’ve found is that the first version always sucks. I don’t mean this because I’m self-effacing or that we’re modest about it. I mean it in the sense that they really do suck.”
Teaching Company lectures
“Most people to this day think of them as so radically different from each other. But I want to posit a different way to look at it. It comes from what I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of art on the part of most people. Because they think of art as learning to draw or learning a certain kind of self-expression. But in fact, what artists do is they learn to see.”
Stephen Hawking actually has the best quote on this and also [a] legitimate story. . . . [He] has the right to complain probably more than anybody. He says that, ‘When you complain, nobody wants to help you,’
If you spend your time focusing on the things that are wrong, and that’s what you express and project to people you know, you don’t become a source of growth for people, you become a source of destruction for people.
‘Not only am I not going to say anything negative about the situation I’m in, but I’m not going to let myself think anything negative about it.’ . . .
“If anybody is going to go out and pitch investors, my advice is to make your first 10 meetings with investors that you don’t really want funding from, because you’re probably going to suck in the beginning. I sucked for a really long time.”
“Magen veLo Yera’e,” literally “the unseen shield,” or “defender who shall not be seen.”
“Bezos said, ‘The whole point, the reason this is so hard to get off the earth, is to defeat gravity the first time. Once we do that, why would you want to go to Mars? We should just live on space stations and mine asteroids and everything is much better than being on Mars.’ And in 30 seconds, he had completely changed the course of my life, because he’s totally right.”
Mikitani taught Phil “the rule of 3 and 10.” “[This effectively means] that every single thing in your company breaks every time you roughly triple in size.
“His hypothesis is that everything breaks at roughly these points of 3 and 10 [multiples of 3 and powers of 10]. And by ‘everything,’ it means everything: how you handle payroll, how you schedule meetings, what kind of communications you use, how you do budgeting, who actually makes decisions. Every implicit and explicit part of the company just changes significantly when it triples. “His insight is [that] a lot of companies get into trouble because of this. When you’re a quickly growing startup, you get into huge trouble because you blow right through a few of these triplings without really
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“Big companies get in trouble for exactly the opposite reason. Let’s say you get to 10,000 people in your company and, theoretically, you figured out how to run things at 10,000. Well, your next big point isn’t until 30,000. But you’re probably not going to get the 30,000 ever, or certainly not within a few years. It might take a decade or more for a company to go from 10,000 to 30,000. But no one feels like waiting around for a decade or more to reinvent themselves, and so big companies are constantly pushing all of these bullshit innovation initiatives because they feel like they have to do
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“How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?”
the job I was going to do hadn’t even been invented yet. . . . The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up.
