We live in a world where more equals more.
If you have a million followers then it must mean you are making a ton of money.
The person with 10,000 followers is obviously making less, right?
We don’t know.
While it can be easier to make money when you have a huge and legit following, it’s not easy to get that huge following.
Do you think it’s easier to get a million followers or 10,000 followers?
The answer should be obvious.
So let’s do some theoretical thinking.
If you wanted to make $100,000 in a year then how would you do it in these two scenarios:
- You have a 1,000,000 (a million) followers
- You have 10,000 followers
Mathematically, for option 1, you just need to get each person to give you a dime, but that’s going to be pretty difficult because people don’t want to give out a small amount of money and collecting it a million times would be almost impossible.
For option 2, you’d need each person to give you $10 which is a lot more reasonable for someone to get their wallet out.
But you’d still have to convince 10,000 people to give you that money.
What if you got people to give you $100 each? Then for either option you’d just need to get 1,000 people to do that over the course of a year.
It wouldn’t matter if you had a million follower or 10,000 followers.
You’d just need 1,000 people to give you $100.
That’s very important to note so let’s go over it again.
If you had $100 product and you got 1,000 people to buy it in a year, then you’re going to make your $100,000.
It doesn’t matter the size of your following beyond those 1,000 people.
It doesn’t matter if you have 1,001 or 1,00,000,000,100. You just need those 1,000 people willing to open up their wallet.
You might be saying that it’s a lot easier to find 1,000 people willing to spend $100 if you have a 1,000,000 followers than if you had 10,000 and it’s sound logic.
But it’s wrong.
The reason why is because you have to assume that the people that are willing to spend $100 on your offer all have a similar worldview.
And that’s what truly matters.
Remember when I told you that I used to have a web design blog?
The funny thing is that when I would go to conferences and people would see who I was they always had a shocked look on their face.
Every single time they’d say the same thing:
“I assumed you were a white male in his 40s.”
I wasn’t.
I’m still not.
Here is how I look.
I’m telling you this because when it comes to business, demographics aren’t really the first thing you should concern yourself with unless you have a very specific product that only works well for a specific demographic.
What I mean is that you can’t have a weight loss product for people over 40 when it can actually work for everyone.
So what do you do?
You look at the worldviews of your audience.
The people that were following my web design blog saw design the same way as I did.
The people that followed my blog about blogging saw blogging the same way as I did.
It didn’t matter if they were male or female, black or white, tall or short, or had green hair.
As long as they saw blogging the way I saw blogging, we would connect.
That’s why it doesn’t matter if you have a 1,000,000 followers or 10,000 followers.
In our theoretical business, we just need to find the 1,000 people that share the same worldviews as us with regards to whatever we are doing business in.
That means that we don’t have to bust our ass trying to reach a million followers. We have to bust our ass trying to reach those 1,000 people that mean something to us and we mean something to them.
Now, none of this is new. This concept was pioneered over a decade ago by Kevin Kelly and it’s 1,000 True Fans.
When this concept came out, people loved it. They saw it as the way of the future and yet you still see so many people thinking that they need to scale by going bigger.
Depending on what you do with your business, those 1,000 True Fans might be 10,000 True Fans. Or they could be 100 True Fans.
If your goal is $100,000 (it’s a made-up number, your goal could be much higher or it could be lower), then you can find a way to make it happen by reaching your True Fans.
The difficulty is truly understanding those Fans and making sure they understand you.
It’s much easier to go wide with everything that you do than it is to go deep.