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By the way, this is why just about any famous magazine you can think of covers a broad topic: sports technology men’s or women’s health pop culture current events and so on.īut, the Internet changed all of that. In order to give those issues the best chance of selling and generating a return on your investment, your magazine’s topic would need to appeal to as many people as possible. Just to get started, you were going to spend tons of money publishing and distributing your first issues. Imagine trying to launch a new magazine under those circumstances. Plus, anything that didn’t sell wound up getting thrown away. You had to create, design, and print the materials and then ship them around the world. That was because developing and distributing a publication - whether a magazine, book, or newspaper - had enormous overhead costs. Prior to the World Wide Web, if you wanted to launch a new magazine, you had to create something with mass market appeal. To understand what I mean, and why this matters, consider the example of magazines. How the Web made niche markets accessibleįrom an entrepreneurial perspective, one of the most significant impacts of the World Wide Web is that it’s made accessing niche markets more economically viable. * Peter’s story is based on a podcast and interview I conducted with him on October 15, 2021. Gizmodo became successful precisely because it appealed to the small community of people who do obsess about gadgets. Sure, not everyone in the world wants to spend hours each week reading about the latest and greatest tech gadgets, but that doesn’t matter. Peter Rojas founded the gadget blog Gizmodo. To avoid the challenge of battling large, better-resourced, and well-established incumbents, rather than targeting a huge market, you should consider doing what Peter Rojas did. After all, it’s not like other entrepreneurs are just standing by and leaving that huge market untouched so you can go after it once you’re ready. While there’s nothing explicitly wrong with developing products that appeal to everyone, I’d argue, by building products with mass market appeal, you’re making the already challenging work of building a company even more difficult for yourself because large markets naturally have large, well-established incumbents. And because mass-market companies are the most commonly used examples of “successful startups,” I encounter lots of entrepreneurs trying to build companies around products anyone and everyone might want to use. In other words, enormous businesses that appeal to vast markets. When most entrepreneurs think about tech startups that became successful, they envision companies like Facebook and Uber and Amazon.