In marketing, it’s difficult to grasp the scale of things, and once you grasp the scale it’s difficult to know where to aim.
It’s possible to build a life long business around 1000 true fans as originally outlined by Kevin Kelly – but it’d be completely impossible to build a business with any reasonable economies of scale at that size, and businesses like Coca Cola count their users in the billions – and they’re still aiming for more.
If you’re building a brand to last, to be bigger than yourself, either you need to move your 1000 true fans to an incredible amount of action, or you need more than 1000 users of your product.
If you need 1M users, you probably need billions of impressions on your media, whatever your media choice might be. And keep in mind the true giants count users in billions – so how many ad impressions are they aiming for?