Reminds me of a tip I got from several business school professors. "Aim to take a large fraction of a small market rather than a small fraction of a large market."
Products get virally reinforced. If someone hears about it from one of their friends once, they'll forget about it. If they hear about it twice, they'll remember it. If they hear about it three times, they'll go check it out. With this in mind, it makes sense to start with a nucleus of customers small enough to maximize the chances of the third case happening.
"If you can’t hit the T-ball why are you trying out for the majors?"
...this one struck a chord with me. I've released several iPhone applications over the last couple years, "scratching a personal itch" for the most part so I haven't given much though to who the "specialist" users might be for any of these apps and instead simply tried to design something that meets my personal needs and does so in a reasonably well-designed way.
Of course if one of my apps turned out to be a "hit" and was able to underwrite my attempts at the Google Lunar X-Prize, great!
That hasn't happened yet, but having read this and giving some thought to who could be a specialized audience for one or more of my apps has turned my mind on to marketing opportunities that don't have the "bland or sour taste" of most of the recommended ways of reaching a general audience.
Excellent work putting this into words that are graspable and actionable.
> The photographer’s darkroom is crammed with specialized tools and nomenclature such as “burning” (whitening a portion of the image through intentional overexposure) and “dodging” (darkening a portion of the image by overexposing the negative).
Unfortunately, he's got his definitions of "burning" and "dodging" reversed.
Please don't feel bad about it... --I can't remember which one is my right side. ;)
> such as “dodging” (whitening a portion of the image through intentional overexposure)
Your corrected version is still incorrect. Dodging is "underexposing" to lighten the print image.
Printing from film negatives is by far the oldest and hence most common interpretation. It's what most people have learned in photography lab classes because it is the easiest (and cheapest) process.
When you are dodging, you are blocking light from reaching the photographic print paper and thereby making a portion of the print lighter. When you are burning, you are allowing more light to reach the photographic print paper by blocking everything except for the part you want darker.
Dodging == make lighter (and/or less saturated)
Burning == make darker (and/or more saturated)
The irony is, when you are printing from film positives (think slide film) or to positive print paper (extremely rare), the definitions you originally posted are technically correct in practice but incorrect in common usage.
Sorry for the nit-picking. For what it's worth, I still think it's a great post on a great blog.
Products get virally reinforced. If someone hears about it from one of their friends once, they'll forget about it. If they hear about it twice, they'll remember it. If they hear about it three times, they'll go check it out. With this in mind, it makes sense to start with a nucleus of customers small enough to maximize the chances of the third case happening.