Marketing to the edge

Filed in archive Bootstrapper Tips on October 10, 2006

Back to the subject of Seth's Purple Cow notions, one other point must be made on the subject of to whom we are marketing.

I've been thinking about this a lot too lately as our business model slowly evolves in the next couple of weeks toward what will probably be a gradual, messy, bootstrap start-up.

I'm not worried much about the slow, messy part. My business doesn't require a lot of money at first--just time (mine mostly.) And it seems to me that the best time to make mistakes is in the beginning before we have many customers anyway.

Which brings us back to Seth's thoughts about just who our target audience should be. Seth writes:

Designing ANYTHING for the masses is silly. Why? Because the masses don't buy stuff any more. The edges do.

That's O.K. because the masses won't be buying into my products and services either-at least not in the beginning.

Assuming everyone out there is going to immediately love and use your company's offerings seems like a dangerous and potentially costly forecast and isn't really something a bootstrapper can afford to do anyway. (You don't have a big advertising budget, remember, so how are you going to tell everyone how great you are?)

Marketing to a small but growing group whose interests and needs you understand seems the more sensible way to grow a bootstrap business.

Consider how Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang built their fledgling system used initially by a growing but still fringe Internet community in the early 1990's before any venture capital came into play.

Market to the edge today because someday when that edge becomes main stream those marketing to it will rule the world.