Base

A New Day One and Base Camp strengthened my conviction that there’s never been a better time to be a builder, artist or creator onchain. 

Been thinking a lot about the possibilities crypto can unlock for the attention economy, creator economy, knowledge sharing economy, social economy and self sovereignty game.

Have started to explore these in a miniseries where I dive deep into a range of topics. Here is the foreword. 

They’re all based on the topic of 1000 true fans, but revisited in 2025.

A New Day One and Base Camp strengthened my conviction that there’s never been a better time to be a builder, artist or creator onchain. 

Been thinking a lot about the possibilities crypto can unlock for the attention economy, creator economy, knowledge sharing economy, social economy and self sovereignty game.

Have started to explore these in a miniseries where I dive deep into a range of topics. Here is the foreword. 

They’re all based on the topic of 1000 true fans, but revisited in 2025.

https://paragraph.com/@zachharris/1000-fans-revisited?referrer=0x3402AcA642DdB9C322872Dd84a3d4e2F1C17eFF2

I write about tech + humans + philosophy

Farcaster OG.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/

🐆 Builder → Founder → Consultant @ Grayscale

PunkStrategy

@joanwestenberg.eth your beautiful, articulate, and thoughtful post inspired me to begin writing again. 

Would be curious to hear your hot take, if you'd be open to sharing!

This is a great piece. 

So many of the same thoughts I’ve been mulling over / struggling with. 

My biggest problem with the 1,000 true fans theory is the conversion rate. 

Even a 5% conversion rate from casual consumer to true fan means you need an audience of minimum 20,000 to make that work. 

And to give you numbers - I have 10,000 email subscribers, 28,000 threads subscribers, 26,000 YouTube subscribers, 25,000 mastodon followers and 20,000 Farcaster followers and so far that’s converted to around 500 “true fans.”

The numbers are really tough.

@j4ck.eth and I were talking on this earlier this week. 

We think it’s really driven by the prevalence of algorithm-based consumption or whether we return to follower-based consumption which much is more platform agnostic. 

When it’s algorithm-based, creators are sort of screwed because it’s very difficult for any, individually to upset this balance. The platforms win.

And the trend has been toward algorithm-based because of the greater control & stronger moats platforms get. One of my friends was CFO at Tastemade and experienced this firsthand with TikTok and Meta. 

I think this trend will continue and it will have to get much worse due to AI and monetization before we start seeing a shift back toward platform agnostic follower-based, if ever. People like their platforms and prefer serendipity over 10c, let alone -10c. 

So this transformation is going to take much longer, unfortunately, vs the instant rebellion/revolution that we would all like.

Yes, I think to build that organic flywheel organically, it definitely takes substantial time and effort. Check out Justin Welsh. He developed some hacks for increasing throughput for armies of one. 

Might be a cool way to think about stacking your revenue and product pricing and fractionalized your time.

True fans also assumes some homogeneity within that set of fans, across niches, etc and that’s rarely the case. Means you struggle with creating products that satisfy a broad range of people and monetize less for yourself or ignore most of your audience in favor of your whales that can pay up for something high ticket

Creator economy is still hard

Wow. Thank you for sharing your numbers. I think AI does skew the 1k true fans theory… it’s been somewhat 100xed.