My first thought was how ridiculously out of touch with the economic reality of the 99% this author was. Even if you love an artist and are willing to spend some amount of money to support them, that amount is not going to be anywhere near 1k. This author is deeply ensconced in her elite Bay Area bubble. It is embarrassing, tbh.

My thoughts exactly. I doubt she has fans paying her, it’s just her VC theory that isn’t realistic.

The incredibly annoying thing about this is that there's a really obvious case - software tools. There should be so many cases of people who have written a useful tool and have 100 businesses who pay $1000/year because that tool is the backbone of their $1000 * xxx profit.

The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.

This seems to me like it does happen fairly often. It’s the entire model of JetBrains, RedGate, Sublime, Atlassian, etc.

Adobe is a big one. The Creative Cloud suite is over $600 annually.

Yep, and JetBrains has a pricing structure to roughly represent that. Individual license for intellij is $150. Organization license is $500.

I think there are plenty of cases. Just sell your software instead of giving it away.

> The fact this doesn't happen very often is a significant failure of the tech industry.

It's happens considerably more than you could imagine, but most of these businesses don't market the way Twilio does. Many create niche tools you're probably just not running across (Palisades Monte Carlo Simulation for Excel, Minitab stats workbench, the legion of paid Magento/WordPress/Platform X companion tools).

Not unlike how a vast majority of professional programmers don't work for FAANG, but we pretty much only hear about FAANG.

I agree that this can be very attainable as a B2B developer. The main challenges are both knowing and understanding the problem and solution and then attracting the audience. It's doable and is being done. We hear more about the unicorns. But there is still a lot of room for the little guys.

Cults are where people live off "fans".

Replacing customers with people emotionally engaged to support you is an exploitative process, involving the takeover of people's mindshare, in a way that can be compared to indoctrination.

People rationalizing the means of this indoctrination is deeply disturbing.

Just because you can draw a parallel between the two doesn’t necessarily make it exploitative. Most of the time I’m sure both sides win, the creator gets to follow their passion, the viewer gets to feel they had a part in it by paying some money. There is certainly a potential for exploitation and indoctrination, but that’s really only in extreme cases.

I don't mind people looking to get paid for what they do. There are plenty of models that let you pay artists more easily, I'm fine with those.

What I am talking about is the rationalization of making "fans", increasing engagement and the promotion of "whale" systems. Those lead to the problem I discussed.

You probably also don't mind consuming other people's work for free and for your own advantage. You're arguing from a very emotional and moral point of view. In the end, if the creator doesn't adapt to its audience (monetizing in a way that works) he will probably don't produce the content you value anymore. Nobody wins. People making up sales tactics for "artists" are just realistic. The reason content producers are drawn to manipulation is today's audience that is not able to decide between "valuable" and "worthwhile" content anymore. Everyone expects information to be free and then damns creators if they try to make a living off helping other people to succeed.

At the end of the day, you need to get by. If you want to live off the things you love you will most likely have to adapt to your audience and do sales like everyone else. Might not be an idealist's dream, but it's how humans work. Doing digital stuff doesn't make fans or customers change how they value things. Besides, giving away almost anything for free upfront raises the bar for people to pay anything at all. It's how we work.

Well when I was young I spent about $1k/year on little thingamajigs called cd's. That was perhaps "stupid" in a pure economic sense but I did it. And if I were young these days I can't say I wouldn't give that amount to some random "content creator" who could give me the same joy as we 80's kids got from sitting quiet and listening actively to music albums from beginning to end.

But me now is like "why the hell would I give that kind of money to some rando on the internet that stream games?". My patreon career is limited at giving a podcast creator $10/month and that was hard to justify for myself.

Spending 1k per years on cd's was sponsoring what, 50 different creators @20 each? Not the same thing.

Sponsoring 50 record labels

Correct, but he had no choice about that in the vinyl/audio cd era. And possibly didn't even realize it.

Still, he didn't give all his 1k to the same artist. Mainly because most artist launch at most 1 new album per year?

It needs to be direct engagement at that price point. No one is going to pay Rachel Ray 1000/year for blog access. Someone may pay her 1000/year for access to Skype cooking lessons. High end prostitutes are a nontech example of where they should focus on a small number of Whales. Also people who get paid to do keynote speaches at 20-50k a pop could have long term engagements with 100 fans paying 2k/year.

A fan can be a lot of things.

You can sell software development services, and your fan may be a graphic designer who uses you every time to build out the back-end for the beautiful designs they make. You do a good job, you're their go-to person, they are your "fan".

This is a "think piece" and not based on any research or data. In reality, I'm seeing lots of relatively small entertainers do the 1000 Fans Thing on Twitch and it really works because each subscriber pays 5 USD per month.