Li Jin on The Passion Economy & Its Hidden Currency

In the gig economy: To earn more, you just have to do more gigs, do more work, put in more hours, take on an additional task…

James: You can monetize your super fans to a higher degree such that you don’t need to become widely mega-famous if you can be deeply, vertically famous.

In the Maven case, that’s experts who didn’t really have a way to share that expertise and monetize it with the world.

I think NFTs are a form of a non-fungible like.

What I’m really interested in is companies that are inviting new participants into types of creative work that had been previously inaccessible to people.

We’ve always had creators purchasing attention of consumers… it’s advertising! But much more rare to have the consumers now (the fans) purchasing the attention of the creators.

So they’re enfranchising a new segment of the population to do some type of work that hadn’t really been easy or available to them before.

I think Substack did a lot to pioneer the subscription model of newsletters. But I think those two models (ads or subscription) leave a lot of writers still without a great business model.

In the passion economy: it’s much more about growing your audience or intensifying the relationship that you have with your audience and your customers. It’s about building a depth of fandom.