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independence2 unconnected · 2 more authors in those circles
standing

contested · 6 claims against 1

applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

8 claims · 6 articles · 4 receipts

window

2015-04-24 → 2021-01-10

2 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Weigh the ceiling a small market imposes

A market of ten thousand people at a modest price looks like it needs few customers, but the feedback loops are slower, the affordable channels are harder to find and the revenue ceiling arrives early. The counter-case is that a tiny obscure audience makes distribution almost free, because reaching all of them takes a couple of posts.

What both sides agree on

  • Building for many use cases at once buys you a much larger market at the cost of a much lower lifetime value per customer, so decide which of the two you want.

Where this splits

A small audience reads either as a hard ceiling on growth or as the cheapest distribution you will ever have.

6 claims against 1

Cory Zue · Justin Jackson · Preetam Nath

Pick a large market, a small one caps you

  1. 01Budget for slower growth, a lower revenue ceiling, and a harder search for repeatable affordable channels when the whole market is small.
  2. 02Pick a market big enough that your annual target is a rounding error of it, which takes the pressure off every individual marketing tactic.
the objection · 1 claimCory Zue

A tiny obscure audience makes distribution almost free

Deliberately choosing a tiny, obscure audience makes distribution cheap, because reaching all of them takes only a couple of posts in the places they congregate.

  1. 03Pick a product category that is both large and growing, because that is the pattern behind bootstrappers who reliably clear five figures a month.
  2. 04Build inside a large market on purpose: the raw number of potential buyers is what makes finding your first hundred or thousand customers tractable.
  3. 05Count the population with the same problem before committing, because a genuine problem shared by ten people cannot carry a business.

What it returned

  • 10,000

    Justin's example: a 10,000-person market at $100/month looks like it only needs 100 customers, but the slower feedback loops mean it takes longer to even discover the market cannot sustain you.

  • 5

    With over 5 million PHP developers worldwide, Taylor Otwell only needs 0.02% of them per year to add 1,000 customers.

  • $10k

    From hundreds of founders Justin observed at MicroConf and in MegaMaker, nearly everyone consistently over $10k/month, and certainly everyone over $50k, had targeted a growing category of sufficient size. Taylor Otwell's Forge won 1,000 customers inside a month against a pool of over 5 million PHP developers; Bjorn reached $275,000 a year from Shopify apps against over 500,000 stores; Ruben Gamez launched Docsketch after noting DocuSign's 200 million users.

  • Markets named as large enough include productivity software, tools for ecommerce brands, design tooling aimed at marketers, podcast hosting and publishing, and website builders.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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