I keep seeing the same arc play out with cohort courses.

The cohorts are full, the students are thriving, word is spreading. The course creator has nurtured exactly the kind of learning community they dreamed of building. On paper, everything looks perfect.

Except there’s tension under the hood. The community wants more, but the traditional playbook feels like a series of compromises. The creator can run more cohorts until they burn out. Pack more students into each session until the magic dies. Launch the obligatory newsletter and podcast, even though broadcast content misses the interactive support their community really needs.

The mismatch becomes obvious when you look more closely at the community. There's the ambitious founder who needs daily accountability, not weekly check-ins. The introvert with brilliant insights who gets lost in large group discussions. The mid-career professional practicing concepts at 5am before their kids wake up. The creator’s expertise is locked in a format that forces different learning styles and life circumstances into a one-size-fits-all model.

Zooming out, I see a similar pattern playing out across the broader Creator Economy. We’re in an exciting time, where entrepreneurs can build viable small businesses based around authentic connection rather than an endless chase of mass appeal. Not surprisingly, this moment has birthed a ton of tools for the digital creator’s menu. They can broadcast their expertise through content (newsletters, podcasts, videos), share it live (courses, coaching, workshops), or foster spaces for discussion (communities, Discord). But there's a pattern here - everything either requires the creator's real-time presence or becomes static the moment it's published.

This tension keeps bringing me back to Kevin Kelly's seminal essay on 1000 True Fans.^[1] The insight was beautifully simple: creators don't need millions of casual followers to make a living—they need 1000 people who deeply value their work enough to pay $100 annually. His math was transformative, and unlocked a generation of creator businesses built on serving small, dedicated communities.

But Kelly's model still bumps up against a natural ceiling: real, human connection only scales so far. Whether you're leading cohorts or creating content, you're ultimately sharing your way of thinking — and you need to meet people where they are if they are truly going to internalize your perspective. There's a Dunbar-like limit to how many people you can meaningfully connect with through the existing channels. What if creators could transcend this limitation without sacrificing the personal touch? At its heart, software has always been a tool for thought—a way of encoding specific perspectives and methods that can adapt to different learning styles and life circumstances. Until recently, the realities of software development kept this approach out of reach for most creators. AI is changing that equation, ushering in what I like to call the 1000 True Users era.

As I’ve written before,^[2]AI transforms the fundamental economics of software — building a world-class product requires less people than it did just a few years ago, which is making it financially viable to build for smaller user bases. But beyond the dollars, AI also changes the way that value can be delivered in software. It’s relatively straightforward to train a model for a specific task, as long as you can provide a deep database of quality examples. Most creators, just by virtue of operating their business, are already sitting on a wealth of custom training data for their specific way of thinking. They have the tools to create a unique, valuable model. Now they just need to figure out how to deliver it.

It’s important to realize that success in this case is not another AI-powered chat window. The chatbot was always meant to be an initial entry point to AI, and as the era evolves we’re quickly recognizing that competitive edge is driven by (1) creating a strong feedback loop that continually refines the model and (2) developing the best UI for your users’ workflow. It’s not enough to create a glorified “customer support” chat experience. You need to create tools that will help your community grow and apply your methods to their own life.

I think this is why we’ll start seeing an injection of “traditional” product thinking into Creator Economy businesses. The key to adding a 1000 True Users channel to a creator business will be creating a product that helps the community practice the method or develop their taste <em>on their own terms</em>, powered by a model trained on the creator’s approach. To be successful, creators will need to deeply understand their users’ day-to-day journeys, identifying the best points to integrate their new tool or perspective.

We’re already starting to see this play out with some forward-thinking creators.

• Drew Binsky leveraged the audience from his travel blog to build a custom travel community app called Just Go^[3]
• Zach Pogrob is building on his “Obsession” personal development following by launching a fitness training app, Aura^[4]
• Nat Eliason is publicly requesting (or teasing?) a Strava-for-writers product within his writer community^[5]

I don’t think we’re far from seeing David Perell launch a Write of Passage app, or Tiago Forte build a productivity experience. This space is fertile ground for creators who have already built an audience around their expertise.

The shift to 1000 True Users isn't about replacing the magic of live courses or abandoning community connection. It's about expanding how deeply creators can serve their communities. When Kelly wrote about 1000 True Fans, he helped creators realize they didn't need mass appeal to build sustainable businesses. Now AI is enabling a similar revelation - creators don't need to choose between personal impact and scalable support. By turning expertise into responsive products, they can meet their community members exactly where they are, creating businesses that are both more sustainable for creators and more transformative for the people they serve.