Comment by jmathai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmathai | Hacker News Reader

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.

[1] https://getelodie.com

[1 also] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie

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.

Welcome to survivorship bias. For every person who succeeds there are many who fail but you never hear about them.

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).

What genre if you don't mind? I'm curious if we can hear your mix.

mostly house and deep house (influenced by chicago and detroit artists)

I hope you have the time to write about this in more depth.

I will! :)

can you see yourself making and releasing music again at some point?

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.

Also the first fan could be yourself, if you kid yourself thinking you love it then you will suffer endless questions on why it isn’t taking off.

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.

Nitpick: On Elodie’s homepage, “No Propietary Database” should be “No Proprietary Database”.

Fixed. Thanks.

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.

Things don't always scale like that. It's called the logistic curve. At some it becomes harder to keep growing at the same rate as before.

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.

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