Know your fans.

Have you heard of the 80/20 rule? That 20% efforts drives 80% results.
What if I told you that sometimes 0.02% effort drives 99% of results?

This is what happen when you find someone who believes in your mission.

This is what happened to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia—with more than 55 million articles—was written by a small group of users. Not just small, actually, but tiny.

Even though there are hundreds of millions of users, there are only about 100,000 active contributors per month, and when you look at the small group of writers who make more than 100+ edits in a month, it’s about 4,000 people.

As a ratio, it means that active contributors represent only 0.02%

One of the most active contributors on Wikipedia is Steven Pruitt, who works as a records and information officer for US Customs and Border Patrol Protection. Steven dedicates much of his spare time to editing Wikipedia, and his efforts have garnered significant attention. CBS News even covered his contributions in 2019, as he was recognized as the editor with the most edits on English Wikipedia.

Steven’s contributions include nearly 3 million edits and 35,000 original articles, making him a well-respected figure in the online community. Time magazine even named him one of the most influential people on the internet, in part due to his editing of one-third of all English language articles on Wikipedia. He spends more than three hours a day researching, editing, and writing by pulling information from various sources, such as books and academic journals.

And how much does he earn by doing this? Nothing. He’s a volunteer.

But this isn’t an exception.

There are two billion active users on YouTube, but just a few million upload videos.

In an essay titled “Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers,” which has been widely circulated, Bradley Horowitz, a current Vice President of Product at Google, described the distinction between the 1% of users who create and everyone else.

1 percent of users who create versus everyone else:
1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether
starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

This principle, known as the “1/10/100” rule, reinforces the notion that the 1% of highly engaged users are particularly valuable.

Therefore, it’s crucial to know who are the most valuable users – yours fans.
It may turn out that just 1% of your users is enough to drive the business.
And you don’t want to miss that.