In 2008, Kevin Kelly changed my idea of what a successful business is with his 1,000 True Fans theory.
The idea behind the theory is that if you want to make $100,000 a year, you simply need to find 1,000 True Fans that will pay you $100 a year.
The premise is that you aren’t just looking for random people, but 1,000 True Fans to support your endeavors.
What are True Fans?
People that love everything that you do. People that follow everything that you do. People that buy almost everything that you create.
Think about.
1,000 people.
Not 10,000. Not 100,000. Not 1,000,000.
1,000.
Each paying you JUST $100 a year.
I capitalize “just” because even though $100 right NOW might be a lot to you, what about $8.33?
That’s how much you’d need from the 1,000 people a month to reach your $100,000.
$8.33.
That’s not a lot of money.
Anybody can pull that off and that’s the whole point of the Dream Roadmap.
I’m not saying you only have to focus on getting 1,000 True Fans. You might not need that many depending on what you plan on selling.
You could also supplement your revenue with ads, sponsored posts, affiliate marketing, or services.
There are a lot of paths to $100,000 a year.
However, the goal of the Dream Roadmap is to show you a strategy for obtaining 1,000 True Fans.
Why?
Because it’s the most sustainable business that you can build. If you have 1,000 True Fans that love what you do, then it would take a lot for you to piss them off and leave.
Having 1,000 True Fans means you have 1,000 ambassadors willing to share what you do with the world.
It means that you get to focus on providing them with more and more value every single day.
Designing for Extremes
At Odd Noodle we follow a philosophy called Designing for Extremes.
The idea is that if you design your business to handle the extreme ends of your audience, then the middle will take care of itself.
In the case of your business, if you do everything you can to serve the people that are most fanatical about what you do, then everyone else will follow because they’ll wonder why people are so crazy about you.
When you take care of your True Fans, they end up taking care of you both by paying for everything that you create and also sharing it with everyone that they know.
It’s how we were able to make $100,000 in 7 days without a big launch.
But we’ll get to that story later.
Think about the brands in your life that you would have no problem giving your money to.
No matter what type of product Apple, Canon (cameras), or Nike release, I’m going to take a good look at it because I love those brands.
Same with some authors or musical artists.
The Dream Roadmap is not about building a business that can fall apart tomorrow with a simple algorithm change by Google.
The Dream Roadmap isn’t about using a revenue model that can be destroyed by ad blockers.
The Dream Roadmap is about building a business that can last you 10+ years.
This is not an overnight path to building a successful business.
It’s called the Dream Roadmap because every step is a challenge that you yourself have to make to see if you’re really capable of chasing your dreams.
You get your reward when you make it to the top of the mountain and plant your flag.
Number Chasers
Remember when I talked about how this business you’re creating isn’t a blog?
I say this because when you’re talking about your business, the only number that matters is revenue (or profit depending on how business-y you want to get).
What’s the point in bragging about your 200,000 pageviews when you’re only making $2,000 a month from them?
If you’re on some FB Groups or other online communities you will see a LOT of people asking how to boost their subscribers, followers, and pageviews.
It can make you think that these are the numbers that you need to dive into but they aren’t.
If you’re making $8,333 a month you won’t give a damn about your pageviews until you know you’re bringing in the right people.
(Sidenote: The answer to how do you get more subscribers, followers, and pageviews is always the same. Do better stuff and make sure that the people that will care about it know about it.)
You just care about how many people you can serve in the best way possible.
The more you can serve, the more money you get to make.
The Dream Roadmap is very strategic in that it hones in on a specific person.
Your Hero.
You’re going to convince your Hero that you are the Guide for them.
You’re not going to try and convince the random people that show up to your site and leave after 5 seconds.
You want the Restless Life Hunters. You want the people that are going to increase the one number that you’re looking at: revenue.
It’s a difficult mindset to wrap your mind around.
This doesn’t mean it’s not cool to get a viral pin on Pinterest. You want those moments because they are great.
The difference is though you aren’t living for those moments.
So don’t get too caught up in them.
Everyday you’re going to wake up and ask yourself the same question.
How do I best serve my True Fans?
The One Purpose of Your Business
Through every step of this journey, I need you to remember to do this one thing.
If you can do this and you allow it to dictate all of your business decisions you’ll be fine.
I promise.
What is this one thing?
Your business exists to serve your audience.
That’s it.
If every decision that you make is for the benefit of your audience and will help you serve them better, then you’ll be just fine.
Does this mean you do everything for free?
Of course not.
Notice what I said.
“…help you serve them better…“
We charge for some of our content because it allows us to better serve the people that really want help.
The more money we can make, the more resources we can provide which in turn helps to serve our audience better.
Most of the emails that I send out aren’t sales emails because I want to help serve my audience in the best way possible. Helpful emails do that.
Sales emails get in the way.
As you’ll see later there is a nice balance you can do where your sales emails are no longer sales emails so you don’t have to worry about selling vs providing value.
You’ll notice that every single thing that you do throughout the Dream Roadmap is geared towards best serving your audience.
How many times have you thought about a business and said, “I love what you do, I love how you help me, and my life is better with you in it, but I’m going with the competition”?
It doesn’t happen.
What’s wonderful about creating a business in today’s world is that so many businesses are shitty to their audience.
Do you know one of the biggest selling points I had early on when trying to sell our courses?
I responded to emails.
That was it.
That’s all I had to do.
You can’t imagine how many people would reply back with “wow, I didn’t think you’d respond.“
Unfortunately, I’m unable to do that anymore but at the beginning doing the simple act of replying gained me more customers than I can count.
Yes, you need to make money. That’s one of the goals of this whole journey but serving your audience isn’t in conflict with that goal.
It enhances it.
So no matter what you do, continue to ask yourself if you’re serving your audience in the best way possible.
Seriously, it’s really about the little things that you can do for people that will seem like they aren’t that big of a deal to you but will go a long way for the people that you serve.
Whenever you purchase any Odd Noodle product, you get access to our Slack Community which allows you to talk to us and the community whenever you want.
This isn’t a big deal to us because we love talking to people about business and it just seems like the right thing to do.
Little did we know it would be one of the biggest factors to our success.