Airbnb was launched for conference attendees who were unable to stay in a hotel. “Finally, an alternative to expensive hotels” was its first tagline. But airbedandbreakfast.com (as it was then known) received little traction in the early days; only two people used it for the 2008 South by Southwest conference in Austin. So it shifted away from conferences and towards general travel.
To speak to many, speak to one
Reaching a mass audience first requires sharp focus.
Half the planet is on Facebook (pretty much, with 3 billion users). But it’s original target audience was very niche: it exclusively targeted Harvard students, before slowly expanding to other colleges across the US
When John Mayer tries to write a universal song, it’s always bad. “But if I write a song about something the size of a cup of water, I sometimes notice a week later that it’s got the universe in it.” What’s most personal, John finds, is most universal.
Nike started out as a running shoe manufacturer, long before it ventured into casual shoes and apparel. As co-founder Phil Knight explains, “we just tried to get our shoes on the feet of runners… we thought the world stopped and started in the lab and everything revolved around the product.”
The celebrated director makes his movies with an audience in mind, but that audience isn’t a big group: “It’s me – I am the audience. I am the guy who pays $8 to go and see a movie, and I’m betting there are other people like me out there.”
Shein sells clothes for every need and occasion, but it was originally a portal to buy wedding dresses; branching out into womenswear in the early 2010s and to all types of fashion a few years later.
According to the most commercially successful director of all time, “I always like to think of the audience when I am directing. Because I am the audience.”
The author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers says this about writing: “I started out basically imagining I was writing for a stadium full of replicas of myself—which made things easy because I already knew exactly what topics interested them, what writing style they liked, what their sense of humor was.” In short, focus on what you want to read, not what you think others will want to read.
Before Uber became mass market it was originally a luxury brand – targeted at wealthy professionals and positioned as ‘Everyone’s Private Driver’. It only allowed users to hail a black luxury car and the price was approximately 1.5 times that of a taxi.
The legendary investor drafts his annual letters with his sister Bertie in mind. “She’s smart, but she’s not active in business and she doesn’t read the business pages every day… so, what would interest Bertie this year?”