The antifragility of mass

Removing fragility doesn’t mean something becomes antifragile. It means you’ve removed fragility. Afragile as some would say, or robust.

I’ve been working with a company doing educational material on private finance for little over a year now. During that time, I’ve picked up on a bunch of things regarding my personal finances, just as well as on running a company.

My boss has been running his own companies for almost 20 years, and he’s never had a regular employment himself. What’s really interesting about the business model they have now is that they’re running almost completely on crowdfunding from Patreon.

They’ve reached a critical mass where they don’t have to have any commercials in their podcast, nor on their website, and they wouldn’t really have to have any sponsored content at all, not for the financials.

What they’ve done is to remove a fragility – the fragility of relying on sponsors and ads – and replaced it with backing from genuine people. On top of that, they’re people who’ve come to support the cause themselves rather than having to seek out sponsors yourself, convincing them to sponsor you.

However, the robustness here doesn’t come from the replacement of ads with people. Rather, it comes from the amount of people. As of now, there are about 2000 people backing them with an average of 5 USD per month. They’ve also seen steady growth in the number of backers in the past two years, making them a bit more comfortable in their seats.

The number of backers makes them robust because they can take volatility. If one of the backers chooses to leave, I’d bet all my money on that there will be a new one taking their place. If one of the previous sponsors backed out, that could mean no income that month. The same goes for the company handling the ads on their website, if they decided to back out, there wouldn’t be any income.

In that sense, to that specific pressure, they’re afragile.

To be antifragile, they’d have to become better each time one of their backers pulled out. They’d have to grow more because people were backing out.

Let’s say they would start publishing shit material, or material saying everyone should buy bitcoins (which they’ve been opposing for quite some time). If they were antifragile, people would leave them, stop following them and pull their Patreonage from them. But, their company would be better off yet, because they’d attracted more new followers and Patreons.

Because of the mass of people they’ve convinced to back them, they’re more probable to be antifragile. That’s because people want to be part of a group, and if this company would go out propagating for the right groups, they’d attract the people who want to be a part. Each time they’d say something new, they’d be probable to dig further in to nice groups, leaving them with an even more excited group of followers.

They’d be antifragile, having more people joining them than leaving them for each thing they’d say, until a certain point where they’d be too extreme, and they’d start just losing people.

If, however, your potential market is big enough, you’re improbable to find that point of return.

There’s anifragility in mass because of the statistics of mass. You have more probable outcomes, and with people it’s fairly easy to predict the outcomes.