An oldie but a goodie.

As a creator who is about halfway to building her thousand true fans, I gotta say that Kickstarter and Patreon have both made it a hell of a lot easier to survive on the way to pumping out enough product to get $100 every year from each True Fan. Patreon especially.

Could I ask what do you do?

Maybe they are too polite to say, but I had a quick look at the profile and followed some links to the home page[0] and Patreon page[1]. Also really enjoyed reading the first chapter of Decrypting Rita!

Best of luck with your work.

[0] - http://egypt.urnash.com/ [1] - https://www.patreon.com/egypturnash?ty=h

Actually I'm just terrible at coming back to discussions here to see that people have replied to my comments. grin Thanks for picking up the slack on that question; glad you enjoyed the comic!

Right now I'm mostly mooning about with a bad case of seasonal depression, and sssslllloooowwwwllllyyyy working on the beginning of my next two comics. And the kickstarter for the last volume of Rita.

The threshold of this obsessive "True Fan" is too high; having even one such fan would be an incredible achievement.

Though the underlying idea is sound: you don't need to be a mainstream star to make a living. You just need to be loved enough, valuable enough to enough people. You needn't to appeal to everyone. Instead, find Your People, find your niche.

I've heard this same concept before and it comes across to me as a bit of a fallacy. I may have misunderstood the idea but to me the argument misses the point. In order to have 1000 true fans, how many "regular" fans must one have?

The article even says, "ONLY" 1,000 true fans which seems to be a way of making the idea within reach of the everyday layman/procastinating wantrepreuner.

I would argue that to get 1,000 true fans your work has to be brilliant to a point of gaining a kind of religious zeal within a small number of a much larger audience.

This is just my opinion though.

As an animé fan I was surprised how low the "Manabi Line" is. Less than 3000 sales is about break-even, and that's for a production that was the work of many people (the Japanese model is (generalizing broadly) to sell more expensive products to dedicated fans; CDs can be around $30 (but are often "deluxe" versions with lots of special features) and in the case of animé a single DVD can be $60 and a series will be spread across 4 or more volumes).

So I think there is a sustainable business model where, rather than trying to go mass-market, you sell a specialized product to a much smaller number of very dedicated fans.

This is an excellent model for building any lifestyle business, not just for artists.

If you knew how much money your favorite customers made, and asked for just one day of their income to support you, it becomes trivially easy to work out a definition of sustainability for your business.

For SAAS businesses, the number of "true fans" that are therefore required could be ridiculously low. 100? Maybe 10!