I’m a huge fan of Kevin Kelly’s "1000 True Fans" article at kk.org, where he writes:

You don’t need millions to succeed...

What a fantastic concept, right?

Find your 1,000 true fans, sell them products and services, worth say, $100 per year, and you make $100K. It is a mind-bending concept that completely flips the “I will be successful when I get millions of <fans/customers/users>” idea on its head.

And I’m living proof that this concept works.

We launched DigitalAccessPass.com (fondly known as DAP)  in October 2008 to a list of about 1,300 mostly-inactive subscribers. 

There were probably a few hundred actual, active subscribers in that group. And with that small list, we were able to get 5 sales in the first weekend of the launch. We barely reached 100 buyers in total, the rest of that year.

Encouraged by DAP’s growth and its potential, a year later, my wife Veena Prashanth, Co-founder & Co-Developer of DAP and SmartPayCart.com, and I, with our two kids, sold our house in Ossining, NY, and moved to San Diego, CA. And the rest, as they say, is history! :-)

Here’s the main point: My wife and I quit really lucrative, high-paying, high-power, high-influence jobs, and DAP was WAYYYY short of a 1,000 paid users at the time. More like around 500. And we were able to afford a really nice living with way fewer than a thousand paying customers. And back then, we weren’t even charging a recurring subscription. So these weren’t even repeat-customers – just one-time purchases.

So DAP was launched with a small, cold, barely active email list,  And nearly 11 years later, it’s grown into a pretty big business that provides my family and I with a very blessed life.

Which is why I continue to harp on this one point: You don’t need “millions” of anything in business to have a great life – you don’t need millions of customers, millions of downloads, millions of listeners, millions of website visits, or millions of Facebook page likes, or millions of email subscribers.

You can do really, really well with 1,000 true fans. One... Thousand... True... Fans... Many of whom will hopefully buy whatever you launch.

But here's the big problem now: How do you find them? How do you build your audience from scratch?

Brilliant 5, Blah 95

If you're trying to build an audience so you can create products and services for them and sell more stuff and make more money, you will see a lot of generic advice online, like:

1) Create tons of content
2) Start a Podcast, ask for ratings & reviews
3) Start a Blog, Work on SEO, start building backlinks
4) Buy paid ads on Facebook
5) Start a YouTube channel
6) Start an Instagram account
7) Start a Facebook group
8) Post your links on your Facebook profile & page, on Twitter, on Instagram and every darn platform that will accept a link

Blah. Blah. Blah.

I call these the "Blah 95". Because 95% of such advice you'll find online, is mostly just "blah".

Now, imagine you are 200 pounds overweight. Like, really obese.

You go to an expert physical trainer for advice, and they give you a list of the Top 7 Things you should start doing to lose weight.

So you're all excited about this list, you get home and open the piece of paper that's going to help you lose 200 pounds and change your LIFE!

And all you see is this:

You need to take a ​very, ​VERY specific set of action steps in order to build your audience.

You just can’t spray and pray, especially, when you’re spraying into an empty hall.

What if you have ZERO audience? Zero subscribers? Zero followers? Zero customers?

Or close to zero?

When I launched my first website on a shared website platform called Tripod.com back in 1995, I had ZERO audience.

When I launched my first website about Indian Baby Names, at BabyNamesIndia.com, I had ZERO audience.

When I launched my first PHP scripts website where I created the world’s first ever download protector for PayPal and ClickBank, I had ZERO audience.

And when we launched DAP in 2008, sure, we had an audience, but a rather tiny one.

So if I, an immigrant from India, who moved to the US with his wife and 1 year old daughter, and had to work at a day-job for 9 years just to get a green card, just so I can have the freedom to start a full-fledged business and quit my job, if I can do it, you can do it too.

The 1000 true fans article was written in 2008. But I’ve been using the concept going back to 10 years before that.

I still remember, back in 2001, when I was working on MyWebmasterInABox.com, my password for one of my servers at that time, was "1000copies".

I wanted to be able to sell 1000 copies of my PHP scripts. I knew that if I could sell 1000 copies of my php scripts package, which was being sold for $97 at the time, that would be $97,000.

And that was such a HUGE amount of money for me at the time. And I also knew that if I could sell 1000 copies, that meant 1000 customers. Which means I could create more products and scripts and software for them. And eventually, that website was what lead to DigitalAccessPass.com several years later.

Yes, there's a right way and a wrong way.

​The wrong way will not just fail, but it can also set you back months, or even years, in many cases.

Imagine following the wrong strateg​ies, executing the wrong tactics​, wasting a lot of time, money and effort, learning the wrong things, doing the wrong things, throwing bad money after good money, finally getting frustrated that nothing is working, and then one day ​just shutting the whole thing down and quitting ​entirely!

​What a waste of time, money and effort that would be. ​

It's like being given the entirely wrong directions, and you drive for 200 miles only to find out you were going in the completely wrong direction.

And the worst part is, you have to not only backtrack all the way, and fix your mistakes first.

But then you find out that you're still at Square 1!

And now you've got to spend a whole lot of time, money and effort all over again to get going in the right direction.

And that's assuming you still have energy in your tank and money in your bank.

​I've participated in tens of Facebook groups and online forums over the years. And I've seen ​"experts" dishing out idea after bad idea​ to anyone who will listen. And these experts have never built anything from the ground up, have never been a full-time entrepreneur, and have never ​experienced what it is to start from rock-bottom and build a multi 7-figure business from scratch!

And that's where I can help you.

I'm not a huge celebrity, not even a "normal" celebrity. I'm not an outlier, I'm not someone who lucked out and became a truly overnight success just because I stumbled into something viral.

I'm not a trust-fund kid, I'm not someone who hit the genetic lottery and was born with extraordinary abilities like great looks, amazing voice, or athleticism - well ok, I was born with a great (Indian) accent (LOL), but that's besides the point :-)

I'm talking about ME!! An average dude, an immigrant, who had zero marketing skills, no contacts, no website skills, no social media (like, I mean, really no social media - there wasn't even MySpace back in the day!)

I had no money - I came to the US with literally $500 - as that was the most we were allowed to carry, and that's all the US dollars I could afford at the crazy exchange price.

Under the rules of my US Work Permit, I absolutely HAD to have a J.O.B, continuously, with NO MORE than than a couple of months between jobs (at best), until I could get my greencard and then my US Citizenship - before I could even THINK about working on my business full-time. If I even had a small gap in my employment, I could easily get kicked out of the country.

So yes, I had to scratch and claw for everything I've gotten, where nothing was given, and everything was earned.

And I was able to build a business on the side, working 70 hours at a JOB I hated, that I was overqualified for, making a lot of money, for sure, but still a job that I just did not want to go to, because I wanted to have my own business and own my time, money and freedom. And I had to commute 3 hours a day, catching 3 trains, a car ride to the station, sometimes slipping and sliding in snow, care for my little kids, work on the house, take my kids to their weekend activities, and on and on and on.

So if I can do it, you can absolutely do it too.

And I am almost arrogantly confident that my journey and my knowledge, creativity, and first-hand experience of building something from scratch, of having been a NOBODY, and having no money, and having to be creative in every aspect, and the way I break it all down and show you step-by-step how to start from where you are, and how to grow your audience the right way.... all of that will be more valuable to you than what you can learn from ANY OTHER course out there.

And if you sign up and don't like what you see, you can get a full refund within 30 days. No questions asked. That's how confident I am about how much my course will help you. So there's no risk to you. Sign up below and you can get started with the course in literally 1 minute from now.

Hope to see you come on board and join the family.

“You don't need millions of fans - not hundreds of thousands, not even tens of thousands of customers. 

Just 1000 True Fans can help you lead a fantastic life. 

And I'm living proof of that."

- Ravi Jayagopal
Course Creator and... Amateur Ventriloquist! :-)

P.S: Credit to Kevin Kelly (kk.org) for the concept of 1000 True Fans. And I'm taking that to the next level (hence the "1001") in this course.