Dear startups: Go niche or go home

👋 Hi all,

Last Friday, I shared the upcoming book called ‘Same as Ever’ about things that never change. This inspired me to rewrite an old post I wrote in 2016(!) and why it’s still relevant today. It’s the number one mistake among founders of startups and my most given advice ever.

My bookmarks today are about an ancient fashion brand worth over 8 billion this week and a founder story that moved me since it’s very detailed.

See you on Tuesday,

Bas

Starting a company nowadays is ridiculously easy. You don’t need funding, employees, or an office. Becoming an entrepreneur or founder is just a matter of having a (good) idea, and you’re off. Times are good.

Yes, times are perfect, and there’s a tool, service, or product for every problem you face on the road to building your startup. Unfortunately (or positive if you’re in the consulting business like me), there’s no tool for finding your target audience yet. When it comes down to picking your customer persona to focus on, decisions still depend solely on human beings.

While this may sound obvious or dead simple, most (early) startup failures are still because the chosen target audience was either too big or unwilling to pay for the product after all. Let’s focus on the first problem, the target audience. Who is your (ideal) customer, where do they hang out, what are they currently using to ‘solve’ the ‘problem’? There are thousands of questions like these that would potentially help you crack the case about the perfect target audience.

There’s a common fear amongst founders that if they start small, they will lose potential customers because they don’t specifically pitch their product in their interest. The funny thing is, though, that the opposite is true.

When you start with a small(er) target audience, it doesn’t mean you can never broaden it over time. The magic lies in being brave enough even to dare to start small. This may sound counterintuitive, but focusing on less will eventually reach more.

I found a new ‘trick’ to convince people to start thinking about focusing on a niche(s) or narrowing their target audience for starters. It’s silly, but it gets the job done almost invariably. I set up a new Facebook campaign and didn’t do anything in the targeting besides the country.

For my own country, The Netherlands, this would be a potential of 9 million people. If you decided to target the United States as the only option, you could have 191 million people. You do the math on CAC and CPC :) It won’t be effective, would cost you a small fortune, and you just made a fool of yourself.

So dear startups, your target audience is not(!), never, ever ‘everyone.’ You can’t call ‘everyone’; it doesn’t breathe. Go niche or go home…

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