Does 1,000 True Fans Work for Filmmakers?
If you’re reading this, I’m guessing your goal is to earn a living from your indie films. I’m also willing to bet you’re at least a little frustrated by the traditional way of doing things.
From festivals and distributors, to aggregators and VOD platforms, our distribution landscape is a dysfunctional, predatory mess—where indie filmmakers are usually left holding the short end of the stick.
But there are better ways. Simpler ways. The internet’s fundamentally changed the business of creative work. And for those willing to shirk convention and pick up new skills, it’s possible seize control over your financial and creative destiny, instead of ceding it to unscrupulous middle men.
By going direct to your fans, you can cut all of that nonsense from your life, once and for all.
This piece will explore how filmmakers can make it happen.
An overview of 1,000 True Fans
In case you’ve somehow avoided Kevin Kelly’s insanely famous essay, here’s a quick refresher.
To make a living as a creative person, you don’t need to sell your wares to the masses. You don’t need to reach millions of people. One thousand will do.
The catch is that those thousand people must be what Kelly calls “True Fans.” These are folks who are so emotionally connected to you and your work that they’ll buy anything you put out.
The math works out simply. If you can get 1,000 True Fans to pay on average $10 a month for your work—or for more access to you—you’ve got yourself a healthy six figure income.
Now, 1,000 is obviously an arbitrary number. As is $10 a month. You can change up these variables to suit your needs. But ultimately, you should still come out the other end making a great living from a relatively small audience.
There are two requirements to make this model work.
First, you need a direct connection, and a direct billing relationship, with your fans. In other words, someone who streams your film on Amazon is not a True Fan. But someone who subscribes to you through Patreon is.
And second, you need to create enough value each year to make it economically viable. In other words, if you release one film every two years, and that film costs $5, you’re out of luck. This ain’t the model for you.
If we’re being honest with each other, the True Fan model is geared towards solo creators. It’s aimed at writers and podcasters and YouTubers other creatives who primarily work alone.
For filmmakers, the nature of our work is different. And the economics are more complicated (and depressing). So if we’re interested in pursuing this path, we need to understand what we’re getting ourselves into, so that we can make a few necessary changes.
Will it work for filmmakers?
I’ll tell you straight up that yes, it can work. There are filmmakers out there who’ve been doing it for years (head over to Patreon’s site for proof). But again, if you want to make it work for yourself, it’ll take rethinking how you approach both the craft and business of film.
Let’s start with the limiting factors that make the True Fan model particularly difficult for filmmakers.
Time: Feature films take considerable time to produce. From initial idea to release, it can often take years. Hell, even a decent short film can take a year or more. And the more time you put between your releases, the harder it is to make the True Fan paradigm work.
Collaboration: Unlike blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, etc, films are deeply collaborative by nature. Even for DIY, no-budget projects, a cast and crew of at least 10-20 people is the norm. So if you’re hoping to make the True Fan model to work for your films, you have to grapple with how to compensate your collaborators in addition to yourself.
Cost: Films are, to put it mildly, expensive as hell to make. Again, the economics of the True Fan model make a lot more sense for other types of media because the overhead—and the financial risk—is much, much lower.
Commodification: Like it or not, feature films are a commodity. The vast majority of the public doesn’t pay directly for films anymore, outside of major tentpole Hollywood fare. The rest of time, they just watch whatever’s on Netflix or Disney or HBO. In this context, getting 1,000 people to pay you $10 one time is really freakin’ hard. Getting them to pay you that much monthly can seem impossible.
Let’s not beat around the bush here. These are significant obstacles. And if you keep doing things the standard way, these limitations will hobble your efforts to go straight to fans.
I’ll take it one step further and say this. If your goal in life is to produce one extremely expensive film every couple of years, that’s cool, but trying to make this model work will frustrate you endlessly. I wouldn’t recommend it.
However, if you’re a bit burned out and frustrated by the traditional way, this is an opportunity to rethink your approach to the craft and business of film.
If you can manipulate those variables above more into your favor—making films that aren’t a commodity, more quickly, for less money, and with fewer collaborators and stakeholders—then you can indeed make the economics of 1,000 True Fans work.
Here are some suggestions that’ll help you make that a reality.
Niche Down
I’ve been beating the “niche down” horse to death on Filmmaker Freedom for years, but it’s even more important in this context.
Niching down is how you break free from being a commodity. It’s how you make something that doesn’t compete with Netflix and Disney. It’s how you get a segment of the market to scream “shut up and take my money” when you release something specifically for them.
In other words, it’s a hell of a lot easier to earn attention, build trust, and get people excited about your projects when you niche down. And you’d better believe that trust and excitement are prerequisites for making the True Fan model work.
I won’t get into how to niche down in this article. But if you want to go down the rabbit hole of how to find a niche you love, I would start here.
Start small and snowball up
Many filmmakers have a “go big or go home” attitude towards their next project. They strive to raise as much money as humanly possible, hire a famous actor or two, shoot on location for weeks at a time, and pay for baller VFX. All of which makes sense… IF you’re playing the lottery of festivals and distributors.
However, if you’re hoping to build a sustainable long-term business by going straight to fans, tackling these monster projects right away will hurt more than help. On the off chance you do raise a ton of money and make the film, you’ll be forced into business models/marketing strategies that are incompatible with creating True Fans.
Instead, start small and snowball your way up. Create a handful of inexpensive, easy to make projects in the early days. Use those smaller projects to build up a fanbase and some paying subscribers. Funnel some of that revenue into larger projects, which you can then use to attract more fans and customers. And so on.
You may even get to a point in 3-5 years where you have actually have the resources to make that $2 million film you’ve always dreamed of. And you can do it without selling your soul to a bunch of investors.
Once the snowball’s rolling down the mountain and picking up momentum, it’s hard to stop. But it takes patience and strategy to get there. As the old saying goes, “Start where you are, use what you have, and do what you can.”
On a more practical note, you don’t have to start with feature films (more about that in the next section). What’s most important for attracting True Fans is putting delightful niche media out into the world. That could mean micro films, web series, podcasts where you dramatically perform a script, short stories and essays, etc. What matters is that you use your creative skills to attract the right people into your world.
Create new stuff consistently
The 1,000 True Fans model rewards creators who ship new work every week or every month. Consistency is a key part of building deep, ongoing relationships with fans.
This is why there are countless YouTubers and podcasters and writers who are able to make Patreon and other subscription models work. They’re a constant positive presence in the lives of their audience.
For filmmakers, this presents a bit of a dilemma, because our natural tendency is to disappear off the face of the earth for months or years at a time, then suddenly emerge with a new project. Again, if that’s how you want to operate, you’re likely better off going through traditional systems.
But if you yearn to be more prolific—and I suspect most of us do—there are all sorts of ways to channel that desire into the True Fan model.
You could still make features, but commit to shipping smaller projects, and lots of ancillary content between major releases.
You could ditch feature films altogether, and produce a bunch of shorts and web series, in addition to the ancillary content.
You could expand out to other forms of creativity in addition to film. Show off those writing, photography, music, and podcasting skills.
However you do it, though, you need to find ways to delight your niche on an ongoing basis. If you’re not a consistent presence in their lives, your fans’ passion for your work will eventually fade away.
Create emotional value beyond your films/content
True Fandom works because people feel an emotional connection to you and your creations.
When you find ways to deeply connect with fans, and share bits of your creative process, your life, and your values with them, this whole thing becomes so much more than just a financial transaction. It becomes a way to make new internet friends, and then let those friends support you.
In other words, this isn’t just about making cool content and then asking people to give you money. It’s about building relationships.
From a practical perspective, what this means is that you should find ways break down the barriers between you and your fans. Reply to their comments. Do some livestreams. Do AMAs and live Q&A calls. Build a community for them. Hell, send them cool stuff in the mail every now and again.
Make your fans feel special, like they’re insiders, and the money they spend for access will feel tiny compared to the emotional value they get in return.
Learn respectful marketing
This one’s kinda obvious, but it’s extraordinarily important.
So many filmmakers buy into the myth of, “if I just do great work, my fans will magically find me.” Sorry to be the one to break the bad news, but in this absurdly noisy world, you can’t count on anyone else to advocate for you.
Seriously, mediocre filmmakers succeed all the time because they’re exceptional marketers, while incredibly talented filmmakers languish in obscurity because they don’t want to put themselves out there.
I can’t stress just how much this bugs me, because most people’s reservations about promoting themselves stem from a fundamental misunderstand of what marketing is.
Marketing, at its core, is about earning the attention and building trust with your audience. It’s about understanding exactly who you’re trying to reach, and then finding ways to show up in their world with bearing gifts. That’s it.
It’s not about being spammy and pushy and manipulative and annoying. Sure, you can market that way, and you might even win some short-term attention that way. But 90% of the marketing tactics you’ll read about online come at the expense of trust and relationships. They burn bridges instead of building them.
What I’m getting at is that if you want to succeed at the True Fan game, you not only need to pick up some marketing skills. But you need to root those skills in respect, service, and empathy. When you market to your future fans as you’d want to be marketed to yourself, you’ll find it a hell of a lot easier to create fans.
Play the long game
This last one will make many filmmakers uncomfortable. Our traditional way of operating in the world is jumping from project to project, with each one scratching a different creative itch, and serving a completely different audience.
For the True Fan model to work, you’ve got to keep delighting the same audience, again and again. You’ve gotta play the long game.
This is why I put so much stress on finding a niche you genuinely love. The goal is to identify a market where you naturally enjoy the work, where you get to follow your curiosity, and where you enjoy the relationships you form along the way.
That’s how you win the game of True Fandom. By serving a specific group of people for a long time.
So if you can’t imagine yourself making things for a specific niche for at least a few years, it’s probably better not to embark on this path in the first place. That might sound harsh, but I want to be real with you.
There’s one other reason I bring up intentionally playing the long game.
Most everyone who’s making great money on Patreon right now has been at it for years. They’ve been consistently outputting generous work, building relationships with their fans, and working tirelessly to create and market new work.
I’ll be straight with you. Unless you already have a substantial audience, you probably shouldn’t expect to have 1,000 people happily paying you each month any time in the near future.
Those kind of results take consistent effort, spread out over years. So you’ll likely have to do other types of work—freelancing, gigs, a day job, etc—to make ends meet while you’re building that foundation.
But what I can promise is that if you make it through those lean early days, and you keep showing up to engage and delight your people, you will be able to make the 1,000 True Fans model work, and flourish creatively and financially for years, if not decades, to come.
If you want to keep exploring the art of earning True Fans, I’d recommend heading over to Filmmaker Freedom’s sister site, Ungated. That’s where most of my new writing lives, and my full focus is on helping creatives make 1,000 True Fans a reality. So jump on over if you want to follow me down the rabbit hole.
-Rob
