Blog Spotlight - 1000 True Fans
You don’t need millions of dollars or customers to succeed. Instead, find 1000 true fans who love your work, focussing on creating a direct relationship with them.
A thousand customers is a whole lot more feasible to aim for than a million. If you can get $100 profit from each of them, it’s $100 000 per year.
The number 1,000 is not absolute. Its significance is in its rough order of magnitude — three orders less than a million. The actual number has to be adjusted for each person. But the main message is that a sustainable business is way closer than you might think and especially in the current digital ecosystem - personal touch is an underrated and underutilized tool.
News Highlights
1. Why subscription models will be the new normal for social media
So far, we've all enjoyed free, ad-supported social media platforms, but that seems to be changing. Many platforms have seen their ad revenues drop due to several factors, including a growing amount of bot accounts.
The latest announcement from Meta introduces an ad-free version of Facebook and Instagram, costing €9.99/month for web users and €12.99/month on Android and iOS.
News coming from Meta follows a similar announcement from X - they are aiming to charge users $1/year in two countries to test this new bot-fighting strategy.
Whether it’s to reduce dependence on advertising revenue or to address regulatory concerns, social media giants are increasingly adopting subscription-based models as the new norm.
2. Google is officially trying to make .ing domains a th.ing
You can now register .ing domains as part of an early access program, though you’ll have to pay an additional one-time fee. That fee will go down daily through December 5th. At 16:00 UTC on that date, .ing domains will officially be publicly available.
3. First benchmark results surface for M3 chip in new Macs
The first benchmark results for the standard M3 chip surfaced in the Geekbench 6 database today, providing a closer look at the new chip's CPU performance improvements.
New M3 chips are 20% faster than their M2 counterparts and 37% faster than the M1 chip.
The prices for the new Macs will start at $1999 for a 14-inch MacBook Pro and $2499 for the 16-inch version.
4. X celebrates 60% savings from cloud exit
X has joined the list of companies moving away from the cloud and will save around $60M/year, 60% of their overall annual AWS bill.
Kickstarted by 37signals, looking to save $7M over five years, #CloudExit movements seem to be picking up speed.
Sustainable Engineering Series: #3 WhatsApp
In 2015 WhatsApp had over 900M users - an impressive scale achieved by a relatively small team of 50 engineers. These are their lessons for sustainable engineering.
Erlang for scale and speed - WhatsApp was built using Erlang, a programming language from the '80s, developed to be used with high-speed phone networks. While Erlang remains on the fringes of the modern coding world, it was a natural fit for solving WhatsApp’s scalability and reliability challenges.
Another essential part was that Erlang lets developers work at high speed, highlighting its ability to deploy new code while the application keeps running.
Keep it simple, smarty - when hiring, WhatsApp focused on getting the best and the brightest engineers. Who in turn kept things simple by solving just the problems that needed to be solved.
The number-one lesson is just be very focused on what you need to do. Don't spend time getting distracted by other activities, other technologies, even things in the office, like meetings.
-Jamshid Mahdavi, WhatsApp software engineer