It’s hard to know if something you are working on is going to be a long-term success. There are basically two pieces of advice floating around about building or accomplishing anything. They are:

1) Persevere and keep going. Great things take time to build.

2) Fail quickly. Don’t waste time on things that aren’t working.

We all intuitively know that great things take time to build. There are no overnight successes. It takes 10-years to become an overnight success (just ask any actor, writer, or entrepreneur who has ‘made it’).

And yet, opportunity costs mean that you work on one thing at the expense of an infinite number of other, potentially better, opportunities. That’s why you should ‘fail quickly’ and move on to find the one with the greatest upside.

These two pieces of advice seem contradictory. But, there’s one missing idea that fuses them:

The best indicator of long-term success is how successful you are right now.

If you are building a website, business, podcast, or anything else that takes time to build, your initial success is the best indication of long-term success.

If it starts out great, it will likely continue to be great. If it starts out mediocre (with a soft reaction from your target market), it will likely stay that way.

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic, talks about this idea in his book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. Adams writes:

“My guideline for deciding when to quit is informed by a lifetime of trying dozens of business ideas, most of them failures… The pattern I noticed was this: Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. What you rarely see is a stillborn failure that transmogrifies into a stellar success. Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.”

This model unifies the two contradictory ideas of persevering vs. failing quickly. If something doesn’t start out well, move on. If it does start out well then persevere and keep going.

How do you know if something starts out well? Simple - it will have fans.

If your creation has a handful of avid fans, keep going.

When you create something and expose it to the world, what you are looking for, according to Adams, is a small group of extremely enthusiastic fans.

Not everyone has to love your creation, and most won’t. But you are looking for a small core group with a powerful, positive response. That’s how you know the execution has legs.

When Adams created Dilbert, there were a few very passionate fans that let him know via email how much they loved his work. That was the motivation Adams needed to keep going with the comic strip.

1,000 “true fans” are all you need to make a living doing what you love.

In Kevin Kelly’s article called, “1,000 True Fans,” he argues that all you need to do is find 1,000 true fans to do what you love for a living. He defines a ‘true fan’ as “a fan who will buy anything you produce.”

That means that if you have 1,000 true fans and create a product or multiple products (like a book, album, video, painting, etc.) that you can sell for $100, you will make $100,000 to live off of. That’s a decent living for most people.

With 100 true fans, you also don’t have to spend as much money on marketing, because, as Kelly writes:

“True fans are not only the direct source of your income, but also your chief marketing force for the ordinary fans.”

True fans will do a better marketing job than you ever could. They will tweet out your new content, share your newsletter, pass along your music, re-tweet your blog post, and most importantly, put a fire under your ordinary fans to buy your stuff. They help you make a living, both directly and indirectly.

The best indicator of long-term success is short-term success.

True fans are an excellent proxy for short-term success. If you have true fans quickly, keep going. You may be building something that can change your life.

Start now.

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SOURCES

Adams, Scott. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. Portfolio/Penguin, 2014.

Kevin Kelly’s article “1,000 True Fans” can be found here