Way back in the olden, golden days of the interweb circa. 2014 when it was still a friendly place and hustle culture was still very much in it's infancy (in my corner of the world anyway), I used to follow a guy called Paul Jarvis, and looked forward to his Sunday Dispatches email every week.

At the time Paul was selling an email marketing course called Chimp Essentials and had a web design studio (if I remember correctly) and then he published a book called The Company of One - all about staying small in your business. He then went on to build the Fathom Analytics app which I now use on both my websites instead of Google Analytics because its GDPR friendly (and more importantly, it's not Google).

Anyway, I digress, and I'm going round the houses to get to the point.. which is that one of Paul's most popular blog posts/newsletters was one called "Find Your Rat People" and you can read it here because he kindly put it on the Fathom website after he dismantled his blog. For the TLDR people, the idea is that you simply find the people that get what you do and will follow you and support you in your endeavours. (Paul Jarvis's rat people were the people who, like him, liked rats). Trying to do something like that on the socials is nigh on the impossible - too much noise and distraction, so that's partly why I set sail on my own here. If you're one of my rat people then I know you'll be here cheering me on¹.

To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only a thousand true fans.

This year I found some rat people in the shape of the Social Media Escape Club run by Seth Werkheiser. A random group of internet strangers (at first) all trying to escape the algorithms like me. I look forward to the weekly co-working sessions and lively discussions about quitting the dopamine hit habits we've all developed over the last decade.

In one recent call about revamping our websites someone mentioned another piece out there on the interwebs by Kevin Kelly (one of Wired magazine's founders.. love Wired) which shares a similar premise to Paul Jarvis's rat people - it's called 1000 True Fans - originally written in 2008 long before social media really took off and then updated to reflect subsequent changes in the digital landscape. TLDR: To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only a thousand true fans. You don't need millions of anything to be successful, just a bunch of loyal fans who want to support you in your endeavours because they love what you do.

So rat person or true fan… I look forward to connecting with you sometime soon. Feel free to drop me a line and share your thoughts with me. verity@portinastorm.studio