How to kickstart and scale a consumer business—Step 2: Identify your super-specific who
This is a peek at today’s subscriber-only post—part two of our six-part series on kickstarting and scaling a consumer marketplace. Subscribe to get access to this full issue—and every issue. P.S. If you’ve recently been laid off, or are experiencing financial hardship, request a free subscription by filling out this form. How to kickstart and scale a consumer business—Step 2: Identify your super-specific whoLessons from Substack, Netflix, Yelp, Discord, TikTok, Instagram, Cameo, DoorDash, and dozens of others👋 Hey, I’m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about product, growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out about work. Send me your questions and in return I’ll humbly offer actionable real-talk advice. Welcome to part two of our six-part series on kickstarting and scaling a consumer business. If you’re just joining us, here are links to previous posts, and a sense of what’s ahead:
The main question we’ll be answering in today’s post: Why (and how) do you target a very narrow set of early adopters? Let’s get right into it. In January 2010, when Ben Silbermann launched Pinterest, his initial growth strategy was to target his techie friends. He first emailed friends to let them know about his new site that lets you organize and share the things you love. “What’s the point?” they all asked. He then emailed all of his co-founders’ friends on the East Coast. No one cared. He emailed everybody he knew from his last job at Google, and all of his wife’s friends at Facebook.
He then started spending time at Apple stores, where he switched the default home pages on every laptop to Pinterest.com and stood in the back saying, “Wow! This Pinterest thing is really blowing up.” Didn’t work. Ben started to realize that maybe tech people had no interest in what he was building. But there was an unexpected demographic that seemed to get it, as Ben shared at a talk at Startup School:
On a whim, Ben decided to attend a conference in Salt Lake City called Alt Summit, a large female-focused design and blogging conference. He walked the halls pitching Pinterest and began to see a bit of interest. Eventually he met a woman named Victoria Smith who had a blog called SFGirlByBay. She quickly saw the potential of Pinterest, and they decided to collaborate on a promotion: Victoria created a Pinterest board with all the things that mean “home” to her and then tagged other bloggers to do the same. Each blog had a small but rabid fan base, and their audiences loved it. They got Pinterest. Soon they started to use it for all kinds of other things, and just a year later, Pinterest was at over a million users. Throughout this journey, the product itself didn’t meaningfully change—the audience did. Ben initially assumed that a new tech website would resonate with tech employees. Instead, 30-something female bloggers turned out to be the ideal early adopters. When deciding who to go after when just starting out, it’s important to be super-specific. You need to find your “super-specific who”. As Andy Johns (former growth leader at Facebook, Twitter, Wealthfront, and Quora) put it:
Michael Seibel shared the same lesson from his time at Justin.TV (60-second clip): As did Andy Rachleff (co-founder of Benchmark):
As did Paul Graham:
April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome) calls this your “customers who care”:
And Julie Supan (GTM advisor to YouTube, Airbnb, Dropbox, Discord, and Thumbtack) calls this your “high-expectation customer”:
Nearly every successful consumer company nailed their super-specific who (though not always right away). Here are a bunch of examples: How they found their super-specific whoYelp started very broad and quickly found one specific group that was most drawn to its product:
Cameo started off by focusing on B-list athletes because the idea itself was inspired by one—and it turned out to be a great target:
Netflix went after online DVD fanatics because that’s who they suspected would benefit most from unlimited DVD rentals:
Instagram went after designers interested in photography with a large Twitter following, because those are the people they wanted to set the tone for the platform:
Wealthfront went after young engineers at pre-IPO tech companies:
Discord’s super-specific who was comically narrow:... Subscribe to Lenny's Newsletter to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Lenny's Newsletter to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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Kickstarting and scaling a consumer business
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Step 1: How to come up with an idea
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