We’ve made it! We’ve traced the entire superfan journey, from casual visitors having their earliest interactions with your brand, to active subscribers and followers interested in hearing from you regularly, to engaged and connected members of your community willing to bring you, your brand, and your people closer to their heart, to dedicated superfans who live and breathe your brand and find a true home in your community. And all along the way, we’ve uncovered numerous strategies to cultivate and energize those inner superfans until they become outer superfans.

Keep in mind that these strategies are a soft science, not a hard science. People won’t necessarily proceed orderly through these four stages—they’re not taking a test! And not every fan who comes across you will become a superfan, no matter what you do, while some of them will leapfrog the early stages we covered in this book and go right to raving superfan the first time they make a real connection with you and what you have to offer them.

There’s one more area we need to cover, and it’s not exactly the fun part of building superfans. But it’s crucial, and so address it we must. In the next part, we’ll go over the dark side of building superfans: why the stakes are higher when you have superfans, and what can go wrong as you’re building a devoted audience. But of course, and most importantly, we’ll also go over what you need to know and do to avoid these pitfalls that can befall you as you develop a circle of fans who love you and everything you do.