I had an interesting conversation with a fellow creator today, who sadly got sucked into the world of generative AI.
They were lied to by some of our favourite marketing tech bros.
The lie was that generative AI would help you grow your audience indirectly because you’d be able to create more, which in turn would give you the chance to publish more content and thus you’d have fans/customers/clients flock to you.
And we all know that’s bs on the front end.
So much so, that this person decided to bin off their 20 super fans on their current Twitter account.
To then go and make a new account and re-brand everything using every AI tool available to increase their output of work.
How do you think it all turned out over the last year?
Not good. Not good at all.
What they forgot to mention previously was those 20 super fans were buying all of their work (Prints, stickers, buttons, badges etc)
They were just thrown to the curb like an old box of toys you grew out of as a kid.
The guru’s in general are still pushing the ideology of having massive amounts of followers = the most optimal way to be profitable, especially if you’re an artist and that shit is just wrong.
It’s just that it’s so easy to sell the bigger numbers and the lifestyle that surrounds it.
On top of that. Our brains are so fried from the constant dopamine addiction we put ourselves through when we go down a scroll hole of doom, that if we aren’t building the same lifestyles the big names are doing. Well, then we’re doing it wrong.
Their new account had a lot more followers, but those weren’t super fans. They were similar people sucked into the AI cult and in that short period of time of creating the new account they had less than 10 sales, where previously they were averaging about 10-20 sales a month off of their super fans.
Size truly doesn’t matter when it comes to this whole online game. It’s all about quality and the relationships you build.
Another thing you can do is just close your eyes and visualise yourself standing in a room in front of say 20 people, hell, you’ve probably been to parties with more people than that.
Don’t let the vanity metrics fool you.
Having a tight knit group of super fans is far better overall having ALL of the numbers with no connection.
Stephen Walker.