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February 1, 2007
I am Not Your Target Market
In a post today Brad reminds me of something that I've been telling too many entrepreneurs lately: I am not your target market. If your product is perfectly geared for someone like me, then, in a word, you're screwed. Blessedly, at least from many people's perspective, there aren't nearly enough "me's" to make a market in anything worth selling.
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Josh, I've been beating this drum since first meeting Paul at the Mesh Conference in Toronto last year. Far too many apps built for the techie crowd and not enough built for the masses.
I may have sounded like a broken record at times but the growing dead pool of W20 companies over the last few months proved my point.
Too many apps were built for "cool" and not nearly enough for "cash". Advertising dollars will only support the top traffic sites. As such, apps have to be built that provide a solution and consumers are willing to pay for. Anything else is just a hobby.
This is finally sinking in and I believe 2007 will be the year that we see more apps built for the masses. If not, how much time can techies waste building sites that nobody is willing to pay for?
Best,
George
That's one of the downsides of living in the powerful tech ecosystem that is Silicon Valley - too much validation too early from your friends and neighbors! Another way this manifests itself is start-ups striking up partnerships with other start-ups, thinking that the very act of partnering provides market validation. In my experience, these partnerships very rarely reflect customer value.
It's precisely the point you make of getting outside your head and into others'. I don't think we see enough of this in the TechCrunch world of ours, which turns out to be a limiting factor for many potentially great ideas, innovators and companies. Kopelman 50,000 or so, as it was called a little while back, is a niche. Granted it’s a growing one and is quite influential, but the mass market is still where the money’s at. I think that this year we’ll see a lot more entrepreneurs start to realize this. Mainstream-ish aimed marketing, easier to use interfaces, more practical use-cases and hopefully a full on embracing of the unwashed tech masses will start to take hold. We may even start seeing a decrease in the me-too, repackaging services or plus one feature routes and new ideas aimed at the general consumer, all hopefully created by the same little guys creating the opposite kinds of businesses today. This could maybe even clean up some of the froth building up in the market today. The internet offers cheap and easy development, marketing and distribution methods not only for reaching fans of Web 2.0, but also my mom, my non-techy friends and the Kansas farmer that just bought his first PC for $400 at Wal-Mart.