A common phrase is that “even if only 1% of people do x…”, but that can be a dangerous place to start a conversation.
Years ago, there was a musician looking for new ways to sell his music. He saved up and bought an ad in the back of a major magazine that had over 5 million subscribers. He figured “even if only 1% buy my album, that’s 50,000 sales!”. He produced a ton of albums and anxiously awaited the day that the magazine would be released. When it finally came out, he sold a total of 57 albums and had stacks of them left in his garage for years.
You’ll hear about this in many other areas as well. In churches that I’ve worked at in the past, I heard multiple times about “if we only get 1% of the congregation to help with this….”.
No matter what you’re talking about, getting to 1% can be tough. If I want to reach 1% of the people in Atlanta, that’s 57,000 people. If I just want to reach 1% of the people on Twitter, that’s 3,000,000 people.
Start with one. Write a post that would be awesome for one person. Create a tool that would be useful for one person. If it’s great, it will spread.
[…] few years ago I talked about how 1% can be a big first step, depending on what you’re trying to do. When it comes to effort, though, 1% isn’t too […]