1,000 True Fans: The MFM Guide to Building a Real Audience
In 2008, Kevin Kelly published a simple essay with a simple premise: if you can find 1,000 people willing to pay you $100 a year, you can make a living. The math is almost too obvious to be useful—until you realize how profoundly it contradicts what every platform, every influencer, every marketing guru tells you to do.
Shaan Puri put it this way: “I was looking at Kevin Kelly’s ‘1,000 True Fans’—the idea that if you have 1,000 people willing to pay $100 a year, you can make a living. But how do you measure a true fan?”
Tim Ferriss connects this to what he calls the Law of Category, taken from The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: “Rather than trying to be the best in a crowded category, try to be the only in a new category.” This is not about competing better. It is about refusing to compete at all—carving out territory so specific that you own it by default.
Quality Over Quantity: The Ferrari Principle
Here is the counterintuitive truth that the entire creator economy gets backward: who follows you matters infinitely more than how many people follow you.
Shaan Puri illustrates this with a comparison that has stuck in my mind since I first heard it: “General Motors sells 2 and a half million cars a year and is a like 50 billion dollar company. Ferrari only sells 13,000 cars—200 times less right, 200 times fewer customers, less reach—but is at $80 billion company, almost double the value.”
How is that possible? Ferrari chose to serve higher-end customers. One Ferrari buyer is worth 200 GM buyers.
Tim Ferriss has a thought experiment that makes this personal: Would you rather have 100,000 Americans picked at random read your book—or have every member of Davos read your book and love your work?
Obviously you pick Davos. You pick the higher-value, higher-signal group.
And yet nobody does this. The platforms make it almost impossible. “The platforms shove the numbers in your face,” Shaan observes. “It is very very easy to start to chase the number so the bad news is it’s hard to resist that the good news is it’s hard for everybody else to resist that in fact they won’t even try everybody else will fall into this trap and so it is actually a competitive advantage to completely ignore the numbers at the beginning.”
The insight here is psychological, not tactical. Ignoring vanity metrics is not about being above it all. It is about recognizing that everyone else is playing a rigged game—and choosing not to play.
How to Measure True Fans (Not Vanity Metrics)
If you cannot trust follower counts, downloads, or subscriber numbers, what can you trust?
Sam Parr has a tactic from his days at The Hustle that I find brilliantly simple: “At The Hustle, we used replies. I would purposely include typos or ask people to send pictures of their desks just to see the engagement. We once got 10,000 replies on 100,000 subscribers.”
That is a 10% true-fan rate. One in ten subscribers cared enough to respond to a typo complaint or a desk photo request. That ratio told Sam something no platform metric could: these people were actually reading, actually paying attention, actually engaged.
Shaan extends this critique to the obvious culprits: “Substack does this thing where they pop up a screen to subscribe to five other newsletters. It’s not a network effect; it’s a giant screen where people click ‘next’ by accident. It’s the same with podcasts. There’s a popular VC podcast claiming 2 million listeners per episode, but the data doesn’t match the signal.”
The true fan metric is not a number. It is a question: What would only your true fans do? Find the behavior that requires actual love—replies, referrals, purchases, attendance—and measure that instead.
The Katamari Approach: Start Narrow, Expand Later
Tim Ferriss describes his content strategy using the metaphor of Katamari—the Japanese video game where you roll a small ball that picks up larger and larger objects as it grows.
For The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim did not target “ambitious professionals” or “entrepreneurs.” He targeted MMA fans. Powerlifters. Very specific communities with very specific communication channels. Only after the book gained traction in those niches did it roll into the broader mainstream.
His goal for the podcast follows the same logic: “Not for 100% of the audience to like every episode, but for 10% of the audience to love each episode.”
This is the inverse of how most people think about content. They try to make something everyone will tolerate. The Katamari approach suggests you make something a small group will love—and let that love compound.
Shaan adds a crucial piece to this puzzle: “The internet is a geography vaporizer… on the internet you will find your tribe, you will find the 10,000 people in the world that are as weirdly obsessed about a single subject as you are.”
Before the internet, niche obsession was lonely. Now it is a business model.
The ultimate expression of this is what Shaan calls “productizing yourself”: “The best product is just you pushed out to the world… if I just turned you inside out and the whole world got to see what you are all about, what you stand for, that if you could just productize that—this is me pushed out to the world—that is the best product. Why? Because no one can compete with you at being you.”
The Creator Middle Class: Real Examples of Niche Success
The theory is elegant. But does it actually work?
Sam Parr has spent considerable time investigating what he calls the “creator middle class”—people making serious money from seemingly tiny audiences. “There’s so many people out there that are making 20, $50 million a year and they have like 800 or 400,000 followers in a very niche community like meat smoking or something like that.”
Consider Jonathan Katz-Moses. He is a woodworker on YouTube. Sam describes his operation: “He only has 600,000 subscribers. Which I think most anyone dedicated four years to virtually any niche and they spend 20 hours a week on it, I think they can get to 600,000 subscribers. So he only has 600,000 subscribers and he only is outputting like one video a month… And his tool site is doing around $6 million in revenue now.”
Six million dollars. One video a month. 600,000 subscribers in a niche that most investors would dismiss as too small to matter.
Billy Parks, who backs creators professionally, explains the pattern: “The really interesting thing about backing creators that are in passion categories is they have real expertise in the area that they’re in… these creators that we’re backing and the creators that I think have the best opportunity are the ones that are so deep in a niche that they’ve been working in for five, ten years, they’re like, ‘Oh, they identify the white space.’”
The common thread across successful niche creators: Kevin sells raised farm beds and seeds. Doug sells cars. Jonathan sells woodworking tools. The detailer sells chemicals. Mary sells meat.
These are not flashy tech products. They are deeply unsexy goods sold to deeply passionate buyers.
Bottom of the Funnel: Why Your Niche Needs a Product
Here is the warning Billy Parks delivers to aspiring creators: “I think you can build a big audience that doesn’t transact and you should be careful about that.”
Not all audiences are created equal. Entertainment audiences—people who follow you because you are funny or outrageous or interesting—often do not buy things. They consume content. They do not convert.
The creators who thrive have what Billy calls “bottom of the funnel”—a product that naturally fits what their audience already wants. “Building an audience, establishing yourself as a voice of authority in something that there is a bottom of the funnel… Bottom of the funnel meaning a product that I could eventually sell.”
This is why passion categories work so well. People obsessed with meat smoking will buy smokers, wood pellets, thermometers, rubs. People obsessed with woodworking will buy tools, jigs, wood. The product path is obvious because the obsession creates recurring needs.
Billy names the bar for success: “You really have to be a trusted voice of authority in your niche. Like people really trust Jocko, people really trust Andrew Huberman, people really trust Peter Attia.”
Authority is not the same as fame. Fame is being known. Authority is being trusted. The former might get you sponsorship deals. The latter gets you something far more valuable.
Shaan Puri articulates the ownership model: “The equity in an owned business massively dwarfs the money made from traditional ad rates. Relying on advertisers is essentially renting your reputation to someone else, whereas the larger opportunity lies in owning the products and services moved through your own distribution.”
This is the final reframe: “Build a magnet not an audience. Everybody wants to build an audience, I think that’s the wrong way of thinking about it. The way I think about it is I am building a magnet, a giant magnet that will attract like-minded people into my life.”
A magnet does not chase followers. It attracts true fans.
Getting Started: The 100 Videos Rule
All of this sounds wonderful in theory. But how do you begin when you have zero followers and no proven niche?
Shaan shares MrBeast’s advice: “The advice that Mr Beast gives whenever somebody asks him about how to be a successful YouTuber he tells them go make 100 videos and every video… I want you to think of one thing you’re going to do better than the last video. Maybe it’s your hook, maybe it’s your title, maybe it’s your thumbnail, maybe it’s the storytelling, maybe it’s the editing pace, whatever… 100 videos, improve each one.”
The 100 videos rule is not about luck or virality. It is about craft. It is about showing up, iterating, improving—the unsexy work that separates people who talk about creating from people who actually create.
And when things are not working, MrBeast offers one more reframe that I find clarifying: “Anytime you blame, you say the word algorithm, just switch it with the word people. Because you’re blaming the algorithm—the algorithm didn’t like my video—no no no, people didn’t like your video. The algorithm is just simply giving people videos they like.”
The algorithm is not your enemy. The algorithm is a mirror. It reflects what people actually want. Your job is to make something people actually love—even if “people” means just a thousand of them.
Sources
Primary Episodes
- “How To Grow An Audience If You Have 0 Followers”
- “How To Make $25 Million With A Niche Hobbyist Magazine (#419)”
- [[episodes/7_people_making__5m__10m_from_|7 People Making 10M From Weird Hobbies]] — $10M From Weird Hobbies”
- “7 YouTubers Making +$5M/Year With Weird Hobbies”
- “The Blueprint for living a Dope Life | Tim Ferriss”
Secondary Episodes
- Tim Ferriss: Why You Should Stop Over-Optimizing Your Life — Optimizing Your Life”
- “The Man Behind MrBeast’s $500M Business Portfolio (#475)”
- “Data Backed Businesses Guaranteed To Make +$1M From Day 1”