The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%.
Concentration is a key point I hadn’t appreciated - there has to be a easy way to reach all of them. In Goodreads' case, our initial set of reviewers were all using 2007 era blogging platforms, and had friends on their "blog rolls", and it was thus relatively easy to go viral in those communities.
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