Comments on: How many fans does it take to quit your day job?

By: Gavin Heaton

Gavin Heaton — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:13:12 +0000

The idea of finding 1000 people who are casually interested in you is easy. You could probably build this on Twitter relatively quickly. But getting to the next level where people care enough to spend money rather than attention on you is a challenge.

So, say, you need 1000 people to pay, you probably need a “pipeline” of 10 x that number. That’s where it really does become a fulltime job – keeping up with 10,000 people, providing value to them in their lives etc – with the aim of “converting” them into paying/supportive members of your tribe requires considerable amounts of planning and effort.

I’m not saying it is impossible. Just wondering whether many of us have the capacity to actually deliver on this.

By: rachel

rachel — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 04:12:35 +0000

Nice post, Tim. I remember reading the same thing in Seth Godin’s book a few months back. That said, I also remember thinking that 1000 people who would buy anything you do were also a lot harder to come by than it might initially seem. I can’t think of many (non-high profile) people who would have that.

By: Noel

Noel — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:46:09 +0000

Interesting post Tim. I guess if you have 1000 ture fans and the number will continue to grow through word of mouth. That is if your work can be duplicated for resell purposes.

By: Eddie

Eddie — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:49:47 +0000

Nice post Tim.

Passion attracts loyalty.

Loyalty attracts community.

Community attracts Support.

By: Neerav Bhatt

Neerav Bhatt — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:10:14 +0000

As a blogger I found the spot where I could do generate enough revenue do it fulltime was appx 80000-100,000 pageviews/month

A core of those people are “regular readers” (its hard to estimate maybe 10-20%), the rest are people who came, found the information they were looking for and disappeared back into the internet

I have no idea how many are “true fans” who read all the blogposts because measurements of web traffic and visitor actions are so inaccurate