Link: What did you learn this year?

And maybe they never did.

Consider Seth Godin's meditation on why B.B. King's Times Square Club has very few blues acts playing there now.

And check what Seth says about another hallowed music standby, the Blue Note:

The guys who book this club aren't stupid-they know that the best way to sell the place out is to book someone who's old and famous. Alas, that's not a very good long-term strategy, is it? When the old and famous guys go to the great jazz club in the sky, who's going to take their place?

I equate this to my current employer where much hand wringing goes on over the fact that their readership is dying off and the next generation gets its news from the web.

I started my first few sites with fairly conventional themes and fairly lukewarm response and slowly realized that the customers I want may not even know what they want yet. Marketing to people who are already getting what they want from someone else makes me just another face in the crowd.

As Seth explains:

The idea is pretty simple--find a small group that cares, give them something remarkable and make it easy to tell their friends (the folks who don't care as much).

Looking at it from a logical standpoint, we might never have anticipated that a Bootstrapper's Club launched on MyBlogLog would grow in the exponential way that it has and become a major feeder of visitors to this site.

Think how long it took to build up the mainstream market for anything. Still, the edge today could be the mainstream tomorrow, so the time to build that market is now.