How to Find 1,000 True Fans
Welcome back to the 16,348 of you opening today’s newsletter. We’ve got a shorter topic this morning because I wanted to fill you in on a project I’m launching. If you’re a skimmer, here’s a sneak peek at the idea. If you have time for the full story, I had a fun time writing it 🥁
Meeting a Startup Legend
A little while ago, I found out about Gagan Biyani (Co-Founder of $3B education giant Udemy) over social media.
I’d been hearing about him on Twitter and decided to do a deeper dive into what he was up to.
After a bit of research, I came across a notion page that he put together announcing his new startup idea he was trying to bring to life called Maven.
Alongside Wes Kao (altMBA co-founder) and Shreyans Bhansali (first engineer at Venmo), he was on a mission to democratize the world of cohort-based courses. As time went on and validation grew for the concept, they finally released a website to push their vision out into the world.
When I poked around the website, I saw at the bottom that they were inspired by the simplicity and power of tools like Shopify and Substack, focused on the same objective of empowering creators with better tools. This got me jazzed up.
As a creator myself, I really aligned with their focus. So when I heard Gagan and Wes were opening the gates for early instructors that might want to teach a class in March, I had to drop Gagan a cold email... ✉️
This is what it said:
To be honest, I was a little unsure if I’d get a response. Gagan being a big successful founder and all.
But sure enough, after a couple weeks, I had an email notification. 🔔
I got a note back from Gagan with some nice words and an invitation to chat further since he hadn’t seen many personal branding instructions toss their name in for a class yet.
Here’s what Gagan said back (I got his permission to share):
One thing led to the next and we jumped on a zoom call to chat about each other’s goals.
In the chat, I was quite impressed with what Gagan was building and loved that Maven was built around enabling creators to lead community-based courses on topics they care deeply about.
The Big Question
20 minutes into the chat after we'd gotten to know each other, he shot a question my way:
“If you had the chance, what would you want to teach a course on, Joel?”
I paused for a couple seconds, and replied with something along the lines of “I think I’d wanna teach a course on the skill that’s created the most amount of impact in my career.
I rambled a bit then eventually said “as someone that’s been continually impressed with the amount of opportunities that have followed from simply showing up and sharing ideas online, I think I’d want to teach entrepreneurial thinkers how to find their first 1,000 true fans on LinkedIn.”
This alone has:
I might add, all of this happened without being a “Harvard grad, NYT best-selling author, or Forbes 30 Under 30 in the marketing category."
Just a normal guy from Canada with a willingness to test things out.
What are 1,000 true fans?
It’s a term coined by Kevin Kelly that claims to make a living as an entrepreneur, you only need 1,000 bought-in fans that believe in your craft. Many successful brands, podcast hosts and authors leverage this theory.
Wanna know the hardest part?
Cutting through the noise and making 1,000 people care enough to listen.
And this is where LinkedIn becomes a secret weapon. 💣
With mediocre writing skills and a $0 marketing budget, I managed to scale from 0 to 30,000 followers, earned 10 million+ views, and logged 1,000+ hours testing out how to build a real community on LinkedIn.
With my testing, I learned how to:
1. Cold message A-list executives, thought leaders, and investors
2. Build and ship product ideas that aligned with my target audience
3. Interpret the LinkedIn algorithm and find my online tone with stories
4. Revamp my LinkedIn profile so it ranks for all the best keywords in my industry
5. Creative tactics to land invitations to podcasts, newsletters, and speaking engagements.
6. Outreach techniques that helped me land partnerships with brands like Amazon, Uber, Slack, AirBnB, Adobe, A&W, Microsoft, Twitter, Hootsuite, Disney, and more.
After sharing some of these ideas with Gagan, he was curious about the topic and thought it’d be worth giving it a go.
Gagan's Challenge
After getting aligned on a topic, Gagan shared with me what’d be needed to get the ball rolling on the course idea, and I was a little surprised by the first challenge.
He said:
“The first exercise to test out if there’s interest in your course is to simply ask your community if they’d sign up. Share an announcement that lets them know you’re thinking of this and if you get 100 sign-ups, we’ll give you the green light and help you get it off the ground.”
Right away, I thought of this newsletter community.
In the last survey I posted a couple weeks back, most of you actually asked for a course like this. Take a look at this pie chart from the Google form.
The #1 ask for further support to readers was "1-1 LinkedIn Consulting: to grow my profile and content."
So, I thought this 1,000 true fans idea would be a perfect next step. I figured, if I could share this idea with each of you, you’d let me know if this is a good or bad idea to run with.
So, this is where things get fun... 🥁
To keep things fully transparent, I want to survey each of you to ask if you’d be interested in signing up for a course to help you find your 1,000 true fans.
Next week, I’ll share the results on how people answered and depending on how many of you do or don’t get excited, that’ll influence me launching the course or focusing on other priorities.
As a teaser, here’s what we'd cover:
- steps to go from 0-30,000 followers with no budget
- how to position your profile for traction
- how to DM influencers, ceos, investors
- how to interpret LinkedIn's algorithm
- how to build and ship product ideas and more.
This course would be meant for:
Entrepreneurs who have a great product, but don't know how to market their ideas 📣
Consultants who want a free distribution channel and don't wanna pay for ads 💰
Thought leaders that want a free PR engine that works while you sleep 😴
Does this sound up your alley? If so, I’m launching the first beta course with ~20 people for an early access price of $300.
If this sounds interesting to you, sign-up here to secure your name on the waitlist. *Spots are limited and the sign up form is only 45 seconds. (I timed it).
I’d love to have you part of the first group and highlight some of the founders that sign up in a future newsletter.
Whether you apply to the waitlist or not, I thought this would be a neat story to share on a new project I’m building in public and a really innovative startup in the education space to watch.
As always, if you have any questions or ideas, feel free to send me a note.
Stay outta’ trouble and catch you next week.
✌️ Joel
P.S. Have a friend that you think should sign up? Forward this over to ‘em.