Being a founder

Being a founder 2 - Defining your target audience

By Ted Pin ⋅ July 22, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

One of the most oft repeated rules about starting a business is that you need to define your target audience–your customer–and that you need to define them very specifically. Instead of “people who need flashlights,” you might target “emergency workers who need portable, bright, durable flashlights.”

But what if, like many web services, your audience is ultimately very broad? Intermz’s audience, we have concluded, is “people who want or need to learn something new.” Obviously, because we’re a web startup, that group is also constrained to who have an Internet connection or access to the Internet. Well, that doesn’t narrow the pool down by very much; we’re still talking about hundreds of millions of people. Truly, who doesn’t need to learn new information in this age of information?

But the problem with having a hundred-million target audience is that it’s extremely difficult (nay impossible),  to create a workable plan to get to them. At least at the startup stage.

So, what do you do? Well, we have artificially narrowed our target audience down to students and faculty of the two or three major universities in the Ann Arbor, MI area. We’ made this the first group we are going to target and will move to a wide audience if we are successful. Doing so has made our planning process (and hopefully our execution process) a lot more manageable.

Moral of this story? On your way to changing the world, start small. And work your way up.

Good luck, and go get ‘em.

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