The 2% of Fans Who Actually Want to Pay More

01 /The Concept

Those Beyond is building what it calls "the future of fan communities" – with a specific focus on movie franchise fanbases.

The founding question: if franchises are created with so much imagination, why do their fans still get such a flat social experience – just standard group chats and feeds on regular social platforms?

The answer Those Beyond built is an immersive platform where fans can step inside an interactive world populated by the characters they love – something closer to a video game than a fan forum.

The first live world is built for Mission: Impossible fans.

Four more are coming before the end of the year: Invincible, SCP, The Walking Dead, and War of the Worlds.

The platform supports several types of content and interaction. Users explore themed spaces modeled on film locations – rooms, corridors, and settings where they solve puzzles and complete quests. Group missions let users pursue shared objectives together, building the kind of real community bonds that fan forums never managed. Character profiles let fans adopt and customize franchise characters as their platform identity. And a virtual rewards system for participation and achievement serves as the conversion mechanism: Those Beyond describes it as their primary tool for turning casual fans into invested regulars.

Franchise owners retain full control over how their intellectual property is used within the platform's ongoing community activity.

They can also trigger special "epic events" at any time to spike engagement before a film release or sustain attention between installments.

Those Beyond isn't only courting global blockbuster studios. The platform is explicitly open to independent studios and individual creators who want the same tools for building superfan communities at smaller scale.

The company has just raised £1.2M (~$1.6M), bringing total funding to $8M.

02 /Why It Matters

The stated goal of Those Beyond – turning ordinary fans into superfans – touches on something economically important.

Spotify published research this July highlighting a segment it calls "super listeners" – the equivalent of superfans for music artists. The numbers are striking:

- Super listeners represent just 2% of an artist's audience on average – but generate 18% of total streams.

- They share an artist's music with friends and followers at 9x the rate of regular listeners, expanding the overall audience.

- They account for more than 50% of concert ticket purchases and a comparable share of merchandise sales through the platform.

- And this intensity persists for at least six months after an album release.

A parallel data point: a 2016 book titled "Superconsumers" argued that in virtually every product category, 10% of buyers generate 30% to 70% of total sales. These buyers purchase more frequently and at higher amounts than everyone else, often well beyond what the category economics would predict.

The implication for creators, studios, and brand owners: don't treat fan engagement as vanity. The 2–10% of your audience that becomes truly invested is the group responsible for the lion's share of your revenue. Converting more ordinary followers into that group – and keeping them there – is more commercially valuable than expanding raw audience numbers.

Sesh ([related review](/review/vot-gde-tvoi-samye-glavnye-dengi)) raised $7M in its first round in April on exactly this thesis. The platform lets musicians build exclusive communities for their fans – with tools that deepen engagement through content access, direct interaction, and in-group community experiences.

The same mechanic works for consumer brands. TYB ([related review](/review/dva-kljuchika-k-rostu-pribyli)) built a platform where cosmetics brands can reward their most loyal buyers with exclusive perks – converting them into superfans and, in turn, into super-buyers. TYB users make purchases 40% more frequently than non-users, with 28% higher lifetime value. The founder notes that TYB typically represents 5–10% of a brand's revenue – but delivers a return on investment that beats Facebook and Instagram advertising.

On the gaming side, Showrunner ([related review](/review/kak-budet-vygljadet-novyj-netfliks-jepohi-ii)) raised a strategic round from Amazon in August of undisclosed size. Showrunner built a platform where users create original worlds or add episodes to existing ones – not as games or quests, but as AI-generated video content driven by user prompts.

As Showrunner's founder put it: "In the future, you'll go see a new film on Friday… and by Sunday, thousands of new episodes inspired by that film will already be live." The company is in discussions with major studios about creating new worlds based on their films.

Showrunner refers to its worlds as "game worlds," partly because the line between AI video and gaming is blurring. If AI can generate any video almost in real time based on user input, that video becomes interactive – the viewer becomes the director, choosing outcomes and branching the story live. That's a game in everything but name.

Runway – the AI video platform now valued at several billion dollars – moved in exactly this direction in August, launching a public beta for a game-world creation platform built on the same AI engine.

03 /Opportunities

For product builders: whatever you're creating, you're either building or planning to build a user community. The key question is how to turn ordinary members into superfans and super-buyers – the 2–10% who deliver 30–70% of your revenue. The lever is asymmetric access: what do they get that no one else does, and how do you sustain that sense of being inside the inner circle?

For platform builders: the opportunity is giving product creators, influencers, and artists the tools to do this at scale. The examples in this review make good templates.

The broader suggestion: think about how AI video and game-world technologies can serve this goal. These tools are new, the design space is wide open, and the right application could be genuinely original.