Introduction: The Superfan Paradigm
The year 2008 was a whirlwind for me. In February, I was promoted to job captain at the architecture firm I was working for, and in March, I asked April (my wife, not the month) to marry me, despite my being more of an N’Sync fan. Those were major life-changing moments, but the biggest life-changing moment came just a few months later when, on June 17, I was invited into my boss’s office and was let go from my job.
The US economy was seeing record lows, and so was I. I fell into a state of depression trying to figure things out, especially related to April and our future together. I moved back to San Diego to live with my parents, and before committing to wait out the storm or go back to school to get my graduate degree in architecture, I randomly stumbled upon a podcast that would eventually change the course of my life forever.
The Internet Business Mastery Podcast, hosted by Jason Van Orden and Jeremy Frandsen, planted the idea in my head that I could potentially create a small business of my own on the internet. I began to obsess over the thought of being my own boss, almost as much as I obsessed over anything and everything Jason and Jeremy produced. I binge listened to their show for three to four hours a day. After each episode, I felt energized and inspired, and my mind raced as I brainstormed potential ideas for businesses that I could create. I eventually listened to all 150 episodes available in their archive—twice—and I invested in one of their online courses to help walk me through the process of building a website and an online brand.
Even though I had never met Jason or Jeremy, I was turning into a superfan. This became more apparent when I heard on an episode that Jeremy had decided to move to San Diego, and I actually cried after a sudden rush of excitement poured over me. This was the first time I’d really felt like a raving fan of something that wasn’t mainstream, like a musician or a sports team.
A few weeks after that announcement, I was sitting down with Jeremy at a café, having coffee with him and a few other fans of the show, which nearly didn’t happen because I almost chickened out and turned around on the way there. After introductions and a little fanboying, I found myself in what was a formally structured roundtable discussion called a mastermind group. I’d heard Jason and Jeremy talk about them on the show, but this was my first time ever being a part of one.
Each person got a chance to speak for about fifteen minutes about what they were up to and ask the rest of the group what they might need help with. I had never been so nervous in my life. I didn’t have anything that felt like a real business to talk about, just a crappy-looking website I’d built to help people pass the LEED exam, a specialized exam within the architecture and design industry. It was making only $5-15 a day from advertisements. Not enough to live on, and definitely not anything I was super proud to share with the rest of the group, especially after hearing what some of the other people had to say.
There was a copywriter who was making upwards of $5,000 per client, a fitness expert who was creating and selling online courses, and an author who had a couple of best-selling books. I definitely felt out of place, so when it was my turn to speak, I wanted it to be over as soon as possible so I could hear everyone else, and more of Jeremy’s magic.
But once I started telling the group the story of the LEED exam site I’d built to help others taking the test, the feedback they shared quickly gave me an entirely different perspective on what I was doing—and what was possible. When the group heard how much traffic my site was getting—upward of 5,000 visitors per day—they were flabbergasted. And when they heard I wasn’t doing anything beyond advertisements to monetize the site, they were even more excited to point me in the right direction.
“Pat!” I remember Jeremy himself exclaiming. “You have to create an ebook and sell it on your site!” And he was right. I had a golden opportunity to create a passive income stream using the information and readership I’d built.
So later that night, I went home and started on my ebook. It took a few weeks of late nights to put it together, but within a day of posting it, I had my first sale. I was in business! I had a customer, and it felt awesome.1
And it would take only a few months before I had my first superfan.
Jackie and the Super 1,000
In December 2008, just a few months after launching my first product, I received an email from Jackie, a customer who had recently purchased my exam guide:
Pat! I needed to write this email to you to let you know just how much you’ve helped me! First of all, thank you for your LEED Exam Walkthrough, I passed my test with flying colors just a couple of weeks ago and since then, I’ve been able to get a raise and a promotion at my firm! It was long overdue, but it was passing the exam that finally made it happen.
Thanks to this raise, my family and I are able to plan a trip this summer to California to visit Disneyland. I know you’re in Southern California, would it be possible for us to take you out to dinner? If not I understand, you don’t even know me, HAHA! But, I just wanted to say thank you for what you do. I’m going to tell everyone in my office about you and your guide and make sure everyone who is studying for the exam gets it. It’s the least I can do. Let me know about Disneyland in the summer.
From your biggest fan, Jackie
Your biggest fan? I had a . . . fan? For helping someone pass an exam? This didn’t make any sense to me at first, but it was obvious this wasn’t just one of those “nice things you say to someone.” She actually wanted to take me out to dinner, and even share my guide with her entire firm. Again, for helping a person pass an exam.
Jackie and I swapped a few more emails, and unfortunately the timing didn’t work out for our dinner meeting. But she represented my first encounter with a true superfan of my work, and I was able to experience the power that a single superfan could have in my business. My business grew to over six figures in earnings within a year after selling my first product, and this was all before I’d even started to build an email list! Imagine a tribe of just ten Jackies, or a hundred, or maybe even a thousand! A business can grow exponentially thanks to the power of a few, which is why when it comes to building a successful brand, you don’t need millions of fans like Taylor Swift or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. All you need to shoot for is your super 1,000.
As I was starting my business in late 2008, I came across an essay called “1,000 True Fans” written by Kevin Kelly, senior editor at Wired. This masterpiece, which is still just as useful today as it was back then, was vital in helping me understand how achievable real, life-changing success actually was, and why I wasn’t crazy for wanting to build a business in a super small niche (LEED exam prep).
His thesis was this: If you had just one thousand true fans (which he defines as “a fan that will buy anything you produce”) and each of those true fans provided $100 profit per year on your art, your craft, your work, well, there’s your six-figure business right there! Here’s Kelly’s longer description of what true fans are and what they’re willing to do out of love for you:
“They will drive two hundred miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.”
Sounds a lot like a superfan, huh? In fact, Kelly uses the term “super fan” interchangeably with “true fan” in his essay.
Back to those numbers. One thousand fans times $100 is $100,000. Obviously, that figure is before taxes, and there’s a lot of other things to consider that would affect the actual bottom line, but his point still hits home: “Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum bestseller hits, blockbusters, and celebrity status, you can aim for direct connection with a thousand true fans.” Or, the way I like to put it:
You don’t need to change the entire world to build a successful business; you just need to change someone’s world.
If you’re new to business, this should be reassuring. This is achievable. To add even more perspective, that’s one single fan each day for less than three years. No matter what niche you’re in, there are one thousand people in this world who can potentially see you as their favorite. It’s not going to take one thousand days, though, because as you probably already know, superfans tell everybody, and some of the people they tell will become superfans, too.
If you already have an established business and you’re looking to grow and scale up, this should be exciting. Imagine a team of superfans who keep coming back, not just with more purchases, but also with more people.
And $100 per year? That’s on the low end of what a superfan might spend with you. I know many people who pay $100 per month for things they don’t even care about that much, like cable television or a subscription that they’re just too lazy to cancel. But superfans? They’ll go all out, and you’ll see their impact on your bottom line.
“But Pat,” you may be thinking, “I need a huge audience for my business to be successful, and you already have thousands of superfans…” Well, I want to tell you what having just one—yes, one—superfan can do you for your business.
A few months after my first conversation with Jackie, I got another email from her. She kept me up to date on her job, and she also let me know that she was able to make my website, GreenExamAcademy.com, a recommended resource within an internal advanced education program for her firm. I checked my database and confirmed that over twenty-five people from the same firm, which had multiple locations worldwide, had purchased my guide. And over the course of the next five years, I randomly saw sales come in from more people in the same firm.
That’s what superfans do. They love and appreciate who you are and what you do so much that they’re willing to go to bat for you, and recommend you to others unreservedly. They’re the kind of fans who will help you make your business future-proof.
I want to help you find and cultivate raving fans who will bring unexpected multipliers into your business—like Jackie and the twenty-five others who became my customers because of her—and that’s what this book will show you how to do.
A common question I get when I present the superfan journey is this: how many fans do I really need? The answer: Not as many as you might think. Remember, because of Jackie, at least twenty-five other people bought my LEED exam study guide. If you have just a few Jackies in your audience, someone who can inspire twenty-five other people to act on your behalf, then you’re well on your way. And you can take comfort even if you’re at the very beginning of creating your own audience of superfans, because quality (of fandom) is way more important than quantity (of fans). And yes, the fact that you can build superfans for something as unexciting as an architecture study guide should tell you that the same is possible for you, no matter your niche!
So where do you start if you want to cultivate your own legion of superfans that will follow you everywhere? We’re going to begin at the bottom of the pyramid and work our way up, starting with how to convert your casual audience members—people who were recently introduced to you for the first time—into your active audience. As you read the next few chapters about the superfan journey, I want you to imagine the people in your brand and the experiences that you’ll create for them. Again, you don’t have to do all of these things to make an impact; think of it like a fun list of ingredients that you can pick from to create your own special cocktail of an experience, one that fits your style and taste, and one you can have fun doing!
For now let’s take a closer look at the superfan journey and the most important principle behind developing superfans for your brand.
The Superfan Journey
I was at a business conference a few years ago, and the speaker on stage was talking about how to get noticed in the noisy world we live in so that we can attract more customers and build a more successful business. He offered us a thought experiment:
“Imagine walking down the sidewalk, minding your own business, and then you see a nickel on the ground. And for you superstitious folks in the audience, it does happen to be facing heads up. Honestly, how many of you in this room would stop walking and pick up the nickel? Please raise your hand.”
Would you stop to pick it up? In the room of around 250 people, only about 10 percent raised their hand.
“Now, imagine walking down the sidewalk, minding your own business, and then you see a quarter on the ground. Also heads up. How many of you would now stop walking and pick up the quarter? Please raise your hand.”
A lot more hands went up this time, about 40 percent of the room.
“And finally, what if you came across a dollar bill lying on the ground?”
Now, most of the room raised their hand, although one person shouted that it might be a prank, which was pretty funny.
The speaker said that as we build our businesses, we should try to be like that dollar bill, which has two things working in its favor. First, it’s something we don’t normally come across, so it captures our attention. And second, it has immediate value, so we know it will be worth a person’s time to stop and pick it up. If you want to win, capture people’s attention and show them quickly how you can add value to their lives.
On the mean corners of Business Ave., there’s a wealth of cheap coins on the sidewalk that we pass over and ignore, and other coins that we may see but aren’t worth our time. And I like this analogy, but there’s one big problem I have with it: capturing attention and adding more value is not enough. It’s the minimum.
The phrase “add more value” has become an overused, default, borderline-meaningless answer to almost every “How do I build a successful business?” question out there:
How do I get more subscribers? Add more value.
How do I get more people to share my content? Add more value.
How do I get better search engine results? Add more value.
Adding more value is the mandatory baseline. If you don’t offer value, then you’re not going to get picked up.
Let’s continue the timeline of this thought experiment:
Imagine you find a dollar bill on the ground and you pick it up, and thankfully, it’s not a prank. You put it in your pocket and carry on with your day. How many times during the rest of the day are you likely to think about that dollar bill? How often are you going to pull out that dollar bill and show it to your friends and family? And, if you were to lose that dollar bill, would it ruin your day? Would it change your life? Probably not.
Now, you could argue with me and say, “Pat, a single dollar isn’t life changing, but if I found $10,000 on the ground, then it would be a different story. I would think about that all day, I would share it with people who are close to me, and I would feel terrible if it were suddenly taken away from me.”
That’s a valid argument, but here’s the truth: It’s not the money itself that you’d think about—it’s the possibilities of what that money could do for you. The experiences and opportunities it could create for you. The ability to unlock something new in your life.
And that’s the secret when it comes to creating superfans: to create new experiences and help audiences unlock something new in their life. Not only will you be found, and not only will people understand the value you have to offer, but they’ll feel different as a result. They’ll feel special. And that, in turn, will help them become your superfans.
When you become a superfan of something, it’s not because of a person, a product, a name, or a brand. You become a superfan because of how that person, product, or brand makes you feel.
People don’t become superfans the moment they find you. They become superfans because of the magical moments you create for them over time.
But how exactly do you create those moments, and what do they look like? That superfan journey, and all the methods and details you’ll need to create it, is what we’ll be exploring in this book.
Right now, though, I want to give you an idea of what to expect from the highest level, and for that we’ll need to return to the Pyramid of Fandom.
The entire Pyramid of Fandom represents the total number of people who know about your brand. Creating superfans is all about executing strategies that will take a person from each stage to the next, from casual to active to connected to the top of the pyramid: superfan.
Your casual audience makes up the largest segment of your audience. These are the people who don’t find you because they know you, but rather via a recommendation, a link or mention on another website, a search result, a related video, or something along those lines. They are usually there because you’ve provided something useful, and they are there to get an answer or do a little research before either sticking around or leaving to find answers elsewhere. In terms of numbers, these people represent a majority of your view count or traffic, and many businesses, unfortunately, aim for that alone. People in this bucket are far from superfan status, and so at this early stage in the journey, your goal is to create a trigger that allows them to understand that they are indeed in the right place. That there’s something special for them. That they should convert and become a part of your active audience, so they’ll continue to come back.
Your active audience is the group who knows who you are and what you and your brand have to offer. When you share, create, or publish something new, your active audience makes a decision as to whether or not to invest time or money (or both) in that new content or product. They are active members of the tribe who will take action and speak up, but it may take some convincing to do so. They live in your email list and on social media. They’ve taken action and at one point made a decision that they want more from you, which is a great start. But, they’re still a ways away from the top of the pyramid. Next, you’ll have to work to convert your active audience to members of your connected community.
Your connected community is where the magic starts to happen in your brand. Not only are you able to communicate regularly and easily with this segment of your audience, but they are also having conversations with each other. Community members begin to identify with the group and one another so much that they may even create a name for themselves. This is where a majority of your comments, feedback, and survey results will come from, and when it comes to creating anything new, the community becomes an essential asset for seeding and validating new ideas that can help the business excel and grow. And it’s from this community that you build your brand’s superfans.
The journey from the bottom of this pyramid to the top isn’t easy. It’s a climb, and it takes time. It requires patience, and it requires being hands on. But that’s exactly why it works so well, because most businesses (not yours) aren’t going to do this. Most businesses have the pyramid flipped, like this:
This inverted pyramid is what is known as a sales funnel, and it’s the business model that most people aim for. It’s easy to understand, it’s relatively easy to create, and it’s extremely easy to measure. People enter the funnel from the top, and a certain percentage of those people will become subscribers. A certain percentage of subscribers will see an offer on a sales page, and a certain percentage of those people turn into paying customers.
If you want to double your sales, you have several ways to do this. First, you can simply double the number of people entering this funnel—in other words, gain more traffic. This is why traffic-building strategies are so popular, and the tracking and numbers become so important, especially when you’re spending money to bring more people into the funnel with ads and other paid tactics.
Here’s the second option. Assuming the same amount of traffic, you can simply double the rate at which traffic converts to subscribers, or subscribers to clicks to a sales page, or sales page views to customers. It becomes a fun numbers game that involves testing new strategies that could have a massive impact on the bottom line.
Funnels are extremely important. By understanding a customer’s journey, you’re able to build a systematic operation that can actually make money for you, and that’s the goal. You need to make money in order to stay in business and support your life, and understanding how customers enter the picture and complete the journey is vital to the success of any business.
Unfortunately in many cases, the funnels and the numbers behind them often become more important than the actual experiences that real human beings behind the numbers are having. Unless you’re thinking hard about crafting your superfan journey—establishing all the moments within your brand that make people feel special—you’re going to work really hard to get new people to enter your funnels, which can be exhausting and potentially very expensive.
I want you to be unexhausted and very much not bankrupt. Hence, I want to help you build your very own superfan army.
This book is all about defining what the superfan journey will look like for your business and brand—how the people who find you will become raving fans, will love and support you, and will share you and your work like their life depends on it. I’ll be giving you several proven strategies that brands and businesses of all kinds have used to help their people climb this pyramid. It doesn’t matter if you’re a solo creator (like a YouTuber) or a huge company with thousands of employees (like YouTube itself)—this book will help you grow and activate your fanbase, and have fun doing it.
Maybe the best part about defining and creating your superfan journey? It’s fun! Creating experiences that will move and inspire your audience to act and connect with you is exciting—way more fun than just number crunching and worrying about conversion rates and optimization. That stuff is important, of course. But if you’re having more fun, you’re going to be happier, and your business is going to thrive.
So get excited, because you’re about to have a ton of fun creating your own unique superfan journey using the tactics, strategies, and stories in this book as your guide and inspiration.
Starting from the bottom of the pyramid, in part 1, I’ll show you different ways you can convert casual audience members into active audience members. You’ll learn some of the brilliant ways different brands, large and small, take their casual fans to the active stage, including how video game company Blizzard used one simple strategy to build a subscription-based business of over 5.5 million global subscribers. You’ll also learn my Learn the Lyrics strategy, one I guarantee you’ve experienced before, except no one’s pointed it out to you. I’ll take you back to April’s first trigger with the Backstreet Boys, the one that started it all, and why it wasn’t that first time she heard them on the radio. And stick around for my special Drive the DeLorean strategy, which will help you take people from casual to active by painting them a detailed picture of their potential future.
In part 2, you’ll continue up the pyramid and learn various ways you can captivate your active audience members and convert them into participants in a more engaged, connected community. You’ll learn how to get your audience to speak up, participate, and feel invested in what you do. You’ll see the strategies LEGO used to go from $800 million in debt and almost bankrupt to a company that’s worth more than both Hasbro and Mattel combined—strategies you can use, no matter how big or small your brand may be. I’ll also share a little American history lesson that will open up the doors for you and reveal possibilities for getting more people to talk about you and your brand as if they were a part of it themselves.
And in part 3, we’ll cover how people in your connected community can turn into superfans. This is where we start to focus on creating those extra-special moments, ones that create novelty, defy expectations, and break the mold. These are the strategies that will help you make your fans feel like the heroes of their own story—the special access, unexpected one-on-one interactions, and one-of-a-kind experiences you’ll deliver to create fans for life.
Each chapter focuses on a specific strategy for moving audience members into the next stage on the Pyramid of Fandom. I’ll define the strategy and give you real-life examples of that strategy in action. At the end of each chapter, you’ll see an exercise section. Each exercise will give you a way to execute on the strategy you’ve just learned so that you can actually put things into practice—and see results! I tried to make each exercise as easy as possible to grasp and implement, so that you’ll be able to experience those results almost immediately. I also encourage you to share your results using the hashtag #SuperfansBook.
Throughout the entire journey, you’ll learn powerful methods to create amazing, memorable, share-worthy experiences for your people. As you progress through the book and learn about each part of the pyramid, please understand that you do not need to do all of the things you’re about to learn. Even a few of the strategies, when implemented, can create superfans for your brand. Pick and choose the ones that resonate with you and fit your style. The key is to understand the unique qualities and needs of each segment and tailor the ways you appeal to each one. Just the conscious effort alone will have you doing better than most of the competitors in your space.
Finally, part 4 is where we cover the dark side of superfandom. These chapters are not meant to scare you, but rather to give you a glimpse of some of the dangers that can arise when you raise your profile and people become really invested in you. It’s a big world, and you do need to play it safe.
Are you ready to begin building your very own superfan journey? Take a deep breath, because here we go!