Startup Success Stories - Don't Copy What They're Doing Now!

I was having a conversation the other day with a friend who's considering launching a startup when I had a moment of clarity and was able to succinctly explain a huge mistake that many startups make.

What is the mistake?

Most startups study and emulate the most successful startups that have gone before them (YouTube, Facebook, DivX, Skype, etc...). This is totally natural, but:

Most startups emulate what these success stories are doing now, and not what they were doing when they were actually starting out.

This is often most apparent when it comes to marketing approaches. Many startup CEOs are unwilling to engage in niche marketing as "that market isn't big enough."

They look to the super-successful startups who have achieved widespread market penetration and fail to see that, almost without exception, the success stories started by appealing to a very small and focused group and then expanded out to complementary groups until they achieved market ubiquity (there's my pretentious word for the day).

By way of example, let's pretend we're launching a web startup aimed at creative professionals. We should definitely target ALL creative pros, right? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Unless you have an incredibly large budget (and a big desire to burn though it quickly), the best approach is to identify the ONE specific group of creative pros who your startup product best serves.

In this example, let's assume that graphic designers are the first target. Contact a bunch of them directly, join their trade organizations, get to know them, and win them as a group. Once you've achieved your goals with this group, create and launch a photographers channel and do the same thing. Continue to expand your reach one group at a time (illustrators, web designers, copywriters, advertising professionals, etc, etc, etc).

Along the way, make sure you're adding the features for each group (or positioning the existing features in a manner that makes sense for each group). At some point in the process you'll find that your venture has picked up a life of it's own and that users and groups are starting to emerge spontaneously.

What you'll find at the end of this is that you have a much larger pool of dedicated users and a much more "authentic" and valuable offering.