The Age of 10 True Fans

The internet has changed our world, I think everyone will agree on that. I also think many will agree when I say that the internet made our lives better. Yes, there are a lot of downsides to it as well, but I just can’t believe that there has been more negative impact than positive.

One element the internet disrupted completely, is work. Not just because we can now buy anything online, work fully remote or have completely new jobs in the form of social media managers, website builders and more. But more so that people, starting completely alone or with a few friends, have built massive businesses as creators, artists, creatives and more.

A 1000 True Fans - A Radical New Way of Living

Back in 2008, Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired, published a now-legendary essay titled 1000 True Fans. At the time, the internet was still in its messy teenage years, blogs were exploding, YouTube was barely three years old, and creators were just starting to bypass traditional gatekeepers (which at that point were music labels, publishers, magazines etc. Companies you would need in order to release your creations and to gain a following).

He imagined that the web could make it possible to build a direct connection with your audience, without needing a publisher, label, or distributor. His idea was simple but radical: you don’t need millions of followers to make a living, you just need 1000 “true fans.”

A true fan is someone who will buy anything you make: your book, your print, your course, your concert ticket. If each of them spends just $100 per year directly with you, you’ve got $100,000, enough for most people to live on. The breakthrough wasn’t the math. It was the shift from scale to depth. Suddenly, sustainable creativity didn’t require virality. Getting rid of the gatekeepers was important two fold: first because they had tastemakers who decided which person got an opportunity to showcase their art on their platform or not and secondly they would take a major cut of the profits.

It was a blueprint for a new kind of creative career, one that didn’t rely on mass media, but on real connection.

Kelly’s idea inspired a generation. We are all now very use to the fact that there are millions of people living of off their craft. The word craft also got way more expansive meanings, professional gamers, streamers, influencers, chefs, think about any hobby or profession and there is probably at least a handful of people who developed a following and live from it now thanks to the internet.

From 1,000 to 100: The Passion Economy

By 2020, the world Kevin Kelly had imagined had arrived and matured. The tools were in place, the audiences were trained, and the creator career path was no longer niche. This is why, Li Jin, while a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, published an essay titled “100 True Fans”.

Her core argument: creators no longer need 1,000 people paying them $100/year. They could thrive with just 100 fans paying $1,000/year. Why? Mainly because the infrastructure had changed:

• Platforms like Patreon, Podia, Teachable, and Substack gave creators directer monetization tools.
• Social media made it easier to build a loyal niche audience.
• People were increasingly willing to pay for access, not just content, community, accountability, transformation.

Li Jin called this shift the Passion Economy: where people monetize not just attention, but expertise, trust, and deep connection. A wellness coach, an AI educator, a niche music producer, each could create high-value products or services that a small number of people would happily pay for.

The Rise of the Creator Economy

In the years since Kelly’s essay, his prediction became a full blown industry. Today known to us as the creator economy.

By 2025, the creator economy is estimated to be worth over $202 billion, with projections crossing $848 billion by 2032. But what does that actually mean?

At its core, the creator economy refers to individuals who build audiences and monetize their knowledge, skills, or content directly, often using platforms like YouTube, Substack, Patreon, TikTok, Instagram (and now AI tools).

These include:

• Content Creators: Individuals producing videos, blogs, podcasts, and other media forms.
• Influencers: Personalities who have built a substantial following on social media platforms and can influence their audience’s purchasing decisions.
• Educators and Thought Leaders: Professionals sharing knowledge through courses, webinars, and written content.
• Artists and Musicians: Creative individuals distributing their work directly to fans.
• Independent Professionals: Freelancers and consultants offering specialized services.

You can also see a clear generational shift towards this economy. By 2024, 28% of Gen Z identified as content creators, with predictions indicating this figure will rise to one-third in 2025. A number and growth that makes total sense to me, they are of course the generation born with the internet and are therefore the most internet native. The ease with which they utilize tech is sometimes mind blowing for anyone older than them.

This expansion reflects a shift in career aspirations, with many individuals seeking autonomy and creative freedom over traditional employment paths. The accessibility of digital tools and platforms has lowered barriers to entry, enabling more people to monetize their passions and skills. 

What could be next?

The trend is clear, as said in the opening lines it has changed everything and we are very used to it now. But I want to take this a step further, I have the feeling that this trend, these pov’s, are going to be changed once again.

1,000 fans was scale.
100 fans was value.
10 fans is trust.

Could it be?

Let’s look at the following elements that could make this a reality.

AI Has Made Creation Nearly Free

Ten years ago, launching a product meant months of work and a team. Today, you can generate code, designs, branding, copy, and even launch automated workflows with the right prompts. What used to cost €10K+ and a dev team now costs… curiosity and a few hours on a weekend.

If 1,000 fans once covered your costs, and 100 fans gave you a margin, then AI turns 10 fans into a viable starting point.

You can build solo. You can build fast. And most importantly, you can build again and again. Let’s breakdown a possible solopreneur stack for you.

🧠 Ideation & Validation
• ChatGPT / Claude / Gemini – Brainstorm business ideas, write user personas, test positioning
• Tally / Typeform – Build quick surveys to validate with your audience
• Bolt.ai – Quick and easy landing pages for idea validation, no code required

✏️ Build & Design
• Framer / Figma – Design and launch beautiful, responsive landing pages in hours
• Replit / Cursor / Windsurf – Vibecode and ship full-stack web apps with AI assistance
• Google Stitch / Webflow – Visual web development without touching code
• N8N / Make / Zapier – Automate workflows without engineering help
• Canva – Create brand kits, decks, social posts, mockups, and even product UIs now fully AI-enhanced with Magic Design, Magic Write, and AI video features

🎥 Create Promotional Assets
• N8N / Make / Zapier – Automate workflows without engineering help
• Kling / Flow / Veo3 – Turn a short idea or prompt into cinematic promotional videos
• Flora AI – Auto-generate short vertical video ads with branded motion and captions • Mirage Studio – Generate influencer-style UGC videos with AI avatars and your script

🛒 Web and Sales
• Shopfiy – Easiest way to build and launch a webstore
• Instantly.ai - Especially powerful in combination with N8N/Make for automated cold outreach
• WhatsApp/Discord/Telegram – For free community hosting and building
• Mirage Studio – Generate influencer-style UGC videos with AI avatars and your script
• Stripe – For checkout, billing, and global payments

And there is so much more!! Tools that fully generate presentations, animated graphs and data, generate visual representations of your text, I can go on and on and on. The best part? They are (almost) all free to use, for at least the basics. If you upgrade the most important ones you are still talking very low costs.

The result of this is that you can keep on ideating and testing. Test every little idea, hung, whatever it is. And this is not just for e-commerce of for creators. Great example I just bumped into on LinkedIn:

Just a few years ago he would have probably worked (or been working) at a game studio, 8-hours a day (if not more), to make someone else money. Now he makes his own hours, sets his own rules, can pursuit whatever his creativity feels like and live his life how he wants to.

AI Is Quietly Collapsing Corporations

Large companies are already feeling the pressure. AI replaces entire departments, copywriting, customer support, design ops, even parts of engineering. This week I saw a Dutch version of that. HelloPrint cut headcount from 300 to 120 using AI, without slowing growth. The Rotterdam-based company now runs customer support with AI agents. Former human agents are becoming AI supervisors, managing complexity instead of handling repetition.

We also discussed how this could even expand in the future with AI Agents running complete companies, maybe just controlled or steered by a handful of board members (read the article here).

As big orgs shrink, the solo operator rises.

We’re heading toward an ecosystem of expert generalists, freelancers, and product-minded solopreneurs. These people don’t need scale, they need specificity, speed, and trust.

Is this a bad thing? Not immediately. I think there are many people who would probably like to live a more free life, on their own terms, instead of working for a large corporation where most people won’t even know they exist.

I do also understand that not everyone is made for this solopreneurship life. I wonder if that group of people will go towards a hyperflexible freelance life, a concept you sometimes see in sci-fi movies. It’s a sort of system that you can check in and out of and get tasks assigned to you based on your skill level etc. Not working for one specific company but possibly a new company every day, if you want to.

SaaS Is Getting Replaced by “Just-for-Me” Software

Why pay $30/month for a tool that solves 60% of your needs, when you can generate a solution, a micro-agent or custom dashboard that does exactly what you want?

This is the death of massive SaaS for personal use and/or small, medium sized businesses. Software is becoming personal, short-term, disposable, built for you, by you, or by someone in your circle.

For the past 15 years, SaaS was the model. You’d subscribe to a tool, adapt to its features, and use whatever came out of the next product update. The trade-off was clear: you got stable software that worked for thousands (sometimes millions) of users, even if it wasn’t exactly made for you.

Thanks to AI, we’re entering a new era where software doesn’t need to be one-size-fits-all. It can be one-size-fits-me.

Instead of paying $30 a month for a CRM built for sales teams you don’t look like you, you can now spin up your own. Just an idea, a prompt, and a few focused hours.

And it’s not just about how we build software. It’s about how we use it. These tools probably won’t be built for scale. They’re being built for a small group of people with a specific need, sometimes even just the builder themselves.

Your tool might only serve 10 people. But if it works perfectly for them, that’s enough. One solopreneur’s “micro CRM” becomes a the perfect tool inside a WhatsApp group. An onboarding bot made for your Discord becomes something others clone and tweak. The product just needs to work right now.

All to say that this expands the possibilities to much more people as it is now no requirement to have the skills to scale your idea to millions of users. If you can vibecode something, share it with your audience, your following, it could already be enough to start a brand new (personal) cashflow.

Products Will Soon Behave Like Content

I have the feeling that the above trends and developments are also going to result in a very different way of looking at/using different products and tools. As things are so easy to make, to solve such a specific problem, at (maybe even) a very specific moment in time, it feels like the life cycle of a tool will be shorten drastically. Not because they’re worse, but because they’ll feel more like content: launched into the world, used immediately, shared if useful, and discarded or remixed just as fast.

A product that solves your problem this week might be irrelevant next week. Not because the value disappeared but because the context changed. It served its purpose. It did its job. Now there’s something else.

This shift could also mean that we start discovering tools like we discover memes or TikToks. Someone sends it to you in a group chat. You see it on a Substack. It gets dropped in a Twitter reply. Not through official launches or ads, but through casual, human recommendation: “Hey, this works.”

It ads to the earlier described vibe for builders, quick, creative, not perfect. Your little tool or solution spreads if it helps anyone. It dies if it doesn’t. Both outcomes are fine.

This is a shift from permanence to momentum.

From: “What’s your 5-year product roadmap?”
To: “What’s something useful you can ship today?”

Blockchain Will Break the Final Gate

Most of you know I am a strong blockchain believer, for more reasons than one. This is one of those big reasons though. If AI is removing the friction to build, blockchain is removing the friction to earn.

We now have fast, cheap, reliable chains that anyone can build on without knowing how to code smart contracts or manage gas fees. Yes, the UX is actually improving a lot. Whether it’s Optimism, Base, Farcaster Frames, or even a token-gated Notion page, blockchain infrastructure is finally useable. Quietly, this unlocks a massive shift: creators can now earn without middlemen.

The internet broke the publishing gatekeepers. Blockchain might break the monetization ones.

No more 10% Patreon cuts, or Spotify streaming tax. No platform deciding if your product, art, or IP qualifies for monetization.

With blockchain, creators can:
• Sell access, not just content
• Distribute ownership to early supporters
• Share revenue with their first 10 users
• Prove everything is real, onchain, and trustless

It’s like building a micro-business and a micro-economy around your work.

That means more value goes to the builder, not the platform. You don’t need to scale to 10,000 fans to make something sustainable. You just need 10 who care deeply and are willing to buy in, literally. A great example of this is Zora.

Zora is a creator-owned platform built on Ethereum and the Optimism Layer 2 network. It lets artists, developers, and communities mint and sell digital media, art, music, videos, open editions, onchain, without relying on traditional marketplaces.

What makes Zora powerful for creators:
• Zero platform fees: creators keep 100% of revenue
• Onchain royalties: built into the protocol, not up to platforms (meaning you as an artist will get paid for your digital art gets resold for millions years later, all automatically)
• Open tooling: anyone can launch their own mint page, drops, or even marketplaces using Zora’s APIs and contracts
• Fast and cheap – mints cost just cents, not dollars, thanks to Optimism

Think of Zora as the Shopify + Kickstarter for onchain media, fully owned, fully transparent, and built for creators to earn directly from their audience. Highly recommend checking out the website, just for to see some cool sh*t, click. (and who knows you might find some of my photography on there 😉)

Some serious stats to show real world adaption of the platform:
• Over 618,000 creators have utilized Zora to tokenize and monetize their content.
• More than $27.7 million has been distributed to creators through trading rewards and secondary sales.
• The platform has facilitated over $370 million in secondary market volume, highlighting robust collector engagement.

We’ve never had a more creator-friendly stack than this. And it’s finally becoming real.

From 10,000 to 1,000 to 100… to 10?

I’ll be honest, the idea of making a full living from just 10 true fans might not hold up mathematically for everyone. (but hey the idea sounded very nice for an article 😉) Most people can’t charge €10,000 a year to 10 customers and call it a day. Not yet.

But the direction of the trend is undeniable.

In 2008, Kevin Kelly said you didn’t need mass media, you just needed 1,000 people who believed in what you were doing. Twelve years later, Li Jin showed that with the right tools, deeper connections, and more valuable offers, 100 could be enough.

Now, in 2025, we’re seeing another new evolution of this core idea.

You can build software, content, or services in a weekend. You can launch it to your followers, friends, or group chat. You can earn directly, without middlemen, without funding, without scale. And maybe, just maybe, 10 people is enough to get started.

Not enough to retire. But enough to test. Enough to iterate. Enough to learn.

The economics may still need to evolve. But the energy is already here.

The future doesn’t start with millions of followers. It starts with 10 people who trust you, use what you build, and tell others.

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^{Who am I and why you should be here:}

^{Over the years, I’ve navigated industries like advertising, music, sports, and gaming, always chasing what’s next and figuring out how to make it work for brands, businesses, and myself. From strategizing for global companies to experimenting with the latest tech, I’ve been on a constant journey of learning and sharing.}

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