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Here was a great discussion that I read on the OKDork.com blog. It is about starting locally versus national. This has direct relevance to the iRent2u launch.

There is one point I want to make in response to the views below. There are comments pointing to the fact that many of these companies came out of tech friendly areas, but I think a point they are missing is that these are also capital rich areas, meaning they have lot of investment money. I also think this has great impact on the success of these companies.

Post Found here:

http://okdork.com/2007/06/05/every-major-web-company-started/

Post Starts here:

Every Major web company started… Local. Think about it?

* Myspace started with parties in Los Angeles.

* Google had the tech geeks from the Valley all over it.

* Facebook was Harvard.

* Wordpress was Texas.

Now when you think oh man we should start nationally, think twice.

Any other examples?

* This is especially when you have limited funds. If youridea has real legs it will grow based on being successful locally and will make it easier for you to raise additional funds if needed. Get on base and grow.

* The majority of artists on http://www.indiefy.com are local. Would I like to have national exposure?…yes, but you can’t beat face-to-face communication with bands in the area. 80% of the artists signed up because of a local referral by a friend.

* Don’t forget AOL was all over Dulles, Virginia (I know, where the hell is that right?)

* Yahoo was StanfordCraigslist, eBay and Yelp were SF

Napster was Northeastern U.

Digg, Friendster, and Meebo had the tech geeks from the Valley all over it.

Skype had the oversee asians all over it.

I think all of them have two things in common–Geeks and Hipsters/Trend Setters

Any idea how YouTube got started?

* I think where is got started is not same thing as the target market.
“Start nationally” sounds like you are talking about launching nationwide.

The real point is don’t go nationwide (ads? Marketing..ect) if your
best friends and family can not even use the services. Successful
companies are started to fill a local need i.e without greed of taking
over the world.

* If you think of it, it’s not weird that things happen like that: most of these companies got their momentum from word-of-mouth, which is a local phenomenon. Although it has a scaling advantage, in the beginning web works the same as brick&mortar companies like starbucks did; you need to build a critical mass, which is easiest done locally.

* I can relate to this. I started a small social networking site and tried to go national from day one. It wasn’t until I realized that half of my users were Stanford grads from the Bay Area that I stopped focusing on national reach and focused instead on going deeper in the region where my users already seemed to be.I think the reason is simple — it’s a lot easier to get word of mouth to happen in a geographically dense area. It’s also easier to understand how those in your home geo behave.

* Good point on Starbucks with their Seattle roots. I doubt they would have done as well starting in Wyoming.

* So is it just really hard to start a LOCAL tech company outside of SFI know that some of the PayPal folks think the next huge company will come from the Palo Alto/Mountain View area (they used statistics, of course).

Pretty much all of the companies mentioned in the post started in tech-friendly areas, even if all of them weren’t started in California.

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Of course, we don’t have the pull that Guy has, but still…

How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09

June 03, 2007
By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09Because of Truemors, I’ve learned a lot about launching a company in these “Web 2.0” times. Here’s quick overview “by the numbers.”

0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).

0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.
7.5. 7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domain truemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of open source and Word Press.
$4,500. The total software development cost was $4,500. The guys at Electric Pulp did the work. Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.
$4,824.14. The total cost of the legal fees was $4,824.14. I could have used my uncle the divorce lawyer and saved a few bucks, but that would have been short sighted if Truemors ever becomes worth something.

$399. I paid LogoWorks $399 to design the logo. Of course, this was before HP bought the company. Not sure what it would charge now.
$1,115.05. I spent $1,115.05 registering domains. I could have used GoDaddy and done it a lot cheaper, but I was too stupid and lazy.

55. I registered 55 domains (for example, truemors.net, .de, .biz, truemours, etc, etc). I had no idea that one had to buy so many domains to truly “surround” the one you use. Yes, I could have registered fewer and spent less, but who cares about saving a few hundred bucks compared to the cost of legal action to get a domain away from a squatter if Truemors is successful?

$12,107.09. In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors. During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.

1.5. There are 1.5 full-time equivalent employees at Truemors. For me, it’s a labor of love.

3. TechCrunch wrote about Truemors 3 times: the leak, the leak with a screen shot, and the opening. I wish I could tell you I was so sly as to plan this. Michael Arrington thought he was sticking it to me. Don’t stop, Michael!

261,214. Much to my amazement, there were 261,214 page views on the first day.
14,052. Much to my amazement, there were 14,052 visitors on the first day.
$0. I spend $0 on marketing to launch Truemors.
24. However, I did spend 24 years of schmoozing and “paying it forward” to get to the point where I could spend $0 to launch a company. Many bloggers got bent out of shape: “The only reason Truemors is getting so much coverage is that it’s Guy’s site.” To which my response is, “You have a firm grasp of the obvious.”
405. Because some people had nothing better to do, there were 405 posts on the first day.
218. We deleted 218 of the 405 posts because they were junk, spam, inappropriate, or just plain stupid. Interestingly, half the bloggers complained the site was full of junk. The other half complained that I was deleting posts. 3. A mere 3 hours went by before the site was hacked, and we had to shut it down temporarily. I was impressed. The hacker who did this might be the next Woz. Please contact me if you are.
36. A mere 36 hours went by before Yahoo! Small Business told us that we were inappropriate for this service because of our traffic.

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$29.96. Our monthly break-even point was $29.96 with Yahoo!
$150. Because Yahoo! evicted us, our monthly break-even point quintupled to $150. If you’re interested in buying a monthly sponsorship for $151, you’d make Truemors profitable. 2. A mere 2 days went by before Truemors was called the “worst website ever” by the Inquirer.
246,210. Thank you God for the Inquirer because it caused 246,210 page views. Yes indeed, there’s no such thing as bad PR.
150. A week before we launched, if you typed “truemors” into Google, you would have gotten 150 hits.
315,000. Eleven days after the launch, “truemors” had 315,000 hits in Google. I can’t figure out how this can be, but I’m not arguing.
4. I learned four lessons launching Truemors:

There’s really no such thing as bad PR.

$12,000 goes a very long way these days.

You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away.

Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.

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Just read a very interesting article about niche marketing, where they say that you can market niche and still reap mass market profits, even more. This is very relevant because iRent2u is about to launch and we are constantly looking at how to do this launch. Everything I read tells me I need to launch niche and narrowly defined markets, but it is tough since our Ebay model is really relevant to a broad generic launch.

Article was found here:

http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=117005

Article begins here:

Advertising Age - CMO Strategy - Today’s Niche Marketing Is All About Narrow, Not Small

Today’s Niche Marketing Is All About Narrow, Not Small
Big Impact: The Brands That Will Survive in the New Economy Will Give Up Illusions of MassivenessBy Marsha Lindsay

Published: June 04, 2007
The evolution of our mature marketplace, along with the technology that allows consumers to be in control, has created a seismic shift from one-size-fits-all mass markets to millions of markets of self interest. All mature markets inevitably evolve into this kind of economy, driven by ever-narrower markets of desire and ever-narrower facets of individual self-identities.
Nichecraft: American Girl is one marketer that already gets that ‘niching’ is the competitive strategy of the day. Its business objectives: improved share, margins and profits; faster growth; and the higher turns demanded by investors.
Nichecraft: American Girl is one marketer that already gets that ‘niching’ is the competitive strategy of the day. Its business objectives: improved share, margins and profits; faster growth; and the higher turns demanded by investors.
Photo Credit: Kate Lilienthal

Booz Allen Hamilton explains why: As every market matures, choice increases. Then competition drives up quality and convenience to the point at which offerings become commoditized. The only businesses that then thrive are those that move beyond “me-too” or incremental offerings to marketing more-relevant and more-differentiated products and services. The only way to accomplish this is to focus on a narrower target.

Tech help
Of course, narrower targeting is not a new concept. But today, technology encourages and enables it. Marketers are empowered by more-detailed consumer data, able to micro-target messages, interactively engage consumers with a whole new level of intimacy and frequency, and customize to consumer specs with small-batch manufacturing and new distribution options.

This evolution has brought about a revolution in the economic model we’re all working in regardless of the category in which we compete. As Best Buy, Intuit, Sundance Cinema, Method and others are proving, the really stunning nature of this new economy is how nonmass markets now rival or exceed mass markets in their economic potential.

How do Booz Allen, The Economist, academics and even the popular press now refer to this permanent economic shift in brand strategy? They call it niche marketing. “Niche” is derived from the Latin word for “nest.” The inference of marketing as something that helps individuals feel snug and in harmony with their self concept is the antithesis of the old economy’s marketing to the lowest common denominator.

Today, niche also means something different from marketing segmentation. While segmentation looks for similarities among a diverse group, niching looks for differences within a similar group. It then finds opportunities to customize products and services to the narrow interests of each niche. In this way, nichemanship is a complement to segmentation. In fact, you could call it optimized segmentation.

The smallest nest
The brands that will survive and thrive in the new economy will be those that give up illusions of massiveness and figure out how to excel at attracting and keeping loyal as narrowly focused a niche as is economically feasible.

It’s not just that technology enables and requires it. It’s because consumers who have experienced ever-greater levels of having their self-interests met by a niche provider never again settle for anything less. (You know mass marketing has heard its death knell when even a senior Wal-Mart official admits that “no customer today will stand to be treated as part of a mass market anymore.”)

That’s why, no matter what category you’re in, the future of marketing is niche marketing. It cannot be stereotyped as irrelevant.

In fact, those who ignore niche marketing will experience loss of share, margin and profitability; their value propositions simply will be less relevant than those of competitors. For those slow to adopt niche marketing, the future also is bleak. Attempts to recoup share will be difficult because competitors will have preemptively established closer customer relationships.

Turtles finish last
It’s pure survival of the fittest — but with technology such as DVRs and the world “live” web it will feel like economic Darwinism at the speed of light. The only marketers that survive and thrive will be those that quickly embrace the principles of this new economy’s nichecraft.
Photo Credit: Chuck Berman

Of course, an impressive list of brands in every category of business already get that “niching” is the competitive strategy of the day. These include PepsiCo, Kohler, Hallmark, Crocs, Annie’s Homegrown, Red Bull, American Girl, Clorox, University Islamic Bank, Shouldice Hospital, Fair Indigo, Unilever’s Axe, Target, Crate & Barrel and Hewlett-Packard.

All these companies — from legacy brands to start-ups — have the same business objectives: improved share, margins and profits; faster growth; and the ever-higher returns demanded by investors. That they are turning to niche marketing to deliver on these objectives should tell you one very important thing: They believe that the mature marketplace and resulting new economic model require new means of achieving the universal goals of all business.

While the classic definition of niche marketing — the targeting of a more narrowly defined customer group seeking a distinctive mix of benefits — still rings true, it no longer implies what it did five or ten years ago: A small, low-volume, erratic market opportunity that is transactional, likely unsustainable and unscalable — a course taken by less sophisticated businesses.

In contrast, the new meaning of niche marketing is quite positive. The Economist argues that the very definition of a flourishing economy today is one rich with niches.

Glut of niches
There are many reasons for this esteem, the first of which is that a niche’s size no longer has the same limitations of magnitude as in the past. In fact, today niches come in many sizes. Yes, some are small, like those described in Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail.” But many can be quite large, like the million-customer “mega niche” described in a recent Wired magazine feature. Especially heartening is that many niche brands already represent hundreds of millions in annual sales. Some niches target a narrow interest that becomes the next big trend, disrupting a whole category. Target, Starbucks and Apple, when they started, were all believed to target a narrow passion of seemingly limited potential.

So rather than equating niche with “small,” think “narrow.” As in narrowly targeting a group whose self interest/self concept is so clear that a marketer can offer something ultrarelevant and vastly different from alternatives. Then the scarcity principle allows the marketer to charge a premium, reaping higher margins.

When you expand the relevance and differentiation to multiple products and services (even information, experiences, networking and more), you gain share of wallet and can experience volume and growth that makes up for the narrowness of the target.

Offerings that resonate with the target for which there are few alternatives create a loyal customer base with all the benefits: more predictable revenue streams, lifetime value and word-of-mouth advocacy on your behalf. This, along with consumer-generated content and online communities, create marketing efficiencies that further drive growth and profitability.

In all these ways, the value of niche marketing today is so different from the old stereotype of a marginal business opportunity. Some of its best practices have changed as well.
Marcia Lindsay is CEO of Lindsay, Stone & Briggs, a marketing-communications agency based in Madison, Wis., that hosts the annual Brandworks University, held this year June 5-6. This year’s topic: ‘Why and how to harness the new niche marketing.’
Marcia Lindsay is CEO of Lindsay, Stone & Briggs, a marketing-communications agency based in Madison, Wis., that hosts the annual Brandworks University, held this year June 5-6. This year’s topic: ‘Why and how to harness the new niche marketing.’

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Smaller targets, larger focus
Ten years ago, the medium was still the message. Eight years ago, we could still think of the 4P’s — product, pricing, place, promotion — as essentially independent strategies. Five years ago, everyone started to buzz about customer-relationship marketing. About two years ago, we got really excited about digital-marketing tactics and started to apply them without any real strategic purpose. All this has changed.

So what’s really new about the new niche marketing? It’s realizing that while our targets have to narrow, our definition of marketing communications has to broaden. Today, everything communicates what a brand stands for, all the time.

It’s like the old saying: If you are on the wrong train to begin with, every stop along the way is the wrong stop.

So how do you get on the right train? Ask the niche for directions.
Niching now
To harness the power of niche marketing to achieve your business objectives in the new economy, follow these principles:

1. Position your brand as narrowly as is economically possible.
2. Become the specialist that anticipates the needs of your target.
3. Rapidly work with the target niche to co-innovate.
4. Set as your goal such consumer centricity that the target niche will want to co-brand their identity with yours.
5. Live by a higher standard of ethics.
6. Embrace a business model and metrics that grow the most valuable assets of the new niched economy.
7. Reap first-mover advantage by learning how to identify a niche of opportunity.
8. Re-imagine your role as that of entrepreneurial founder of a special interest group.
9. Forget push marketing; excel at pull marketing.
10. Realize your brand is now “media” competing against all other media.

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I just read a very interesting article by Fred Wilson, the prominent VC from New York and Union Square Ventures. He has some interesting things to say about the future of the music industry in regards to their revenue model. He basically says that they must go to a free distribution / advertising model. I find this very surprising, and wonder how he can make this assumption.

Is this really the future? Nothing digital will ever cost money, and it will all be supported more and more by darn advertisements, the things everyone is trying to so hard to avoid? I find this hard to believe, but if it is true then it has some incredible implications for many businesses, not just music.

Post was found here:

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/06/the_free_music_.html

Post starts here:

The Free Music Business

Free the music
Originally uploaded by Lady Pain.

I’ve riffed on the notion of free as a business model frequently on this blog. We’ve even come up with a name for a business model that uses free as its foundational element - ie freemium.

The fact is that the Internet demands a free business model. It’s a network where content flows freely in abundance. Scarcity works great for physical goods, but crumbles in a digital world.

We learned this lesson in the print world as it moved online in the late 90s. The first instinct of all print media was to charge a subscription to their content in the online world. Today I can think of just one online property that is paid online, the Wall Street Journal. And when it is bought by Rupert Murdoch, it will go free as well. At least I sure hope so.

But it’s also true that many print businesses that have gone after the free online opportunity with a vengeance are making a lot of money now. The New York Times is a great example of this, but there are many more. Online can and should be free because the marginal production costs are basically zero and online advertising is a highly efficient juggernaut that shows no signs of slowing down. Page views are worth a lot more to an advertiser than the amount you can get someone to pay for a subscription to them. And the way media is consumed online, via search and social distribution (emailing links, blogging, etc), requires that the content be free to distribute and consume.

We’ve seen this movie before and it’s time for the music business to watch the movie closely and understand what it says. Free music will be a better business than paid music ever was. Read Bob Lefsetz’ rant this morning. He’s been saying this for as long as I’ve been reading him. This is the point:

what we ve learned is more people want the music than are buying it. Should we try to convert them, or sue them? Is music failing, or is the SELLING of music failing?

So let’s agree that it’s the selling of music that’s failing. What should the music business do? Watch the movie. The print companies went free, accepted advertising dollars instead of subscriptions, plugged into Google for traffic, and the money is now pouring in.

As much money as the media owners are making online, the search and discovery companies are making even more money by delivering the right content (and ads) to the audience at the right time. On top of the content layer is the “discovery/nagivation” layer that makes even more money than the content layer online.

Before it’s too late, the music business needs to build the “discovery/navigation” layer and take a piece of the action so it can participate in that revenue stream as well. iTunes isn’t a discovery/navigation layer. It’s an online version of Tower Records, but it’s worse. You can’t browse the aisles of iTunes and look lovingly at that record you are dying to buy if you can just come up with the cash. iTunes is fine, but I have never found one single artist/song in iTunes. I find it elsewhere (and I won’t buy on iTunes anyway until they take the damn DRM off).

Services like last.fm (social networking), pandora (personalized radio), the hype machine (music blog search & listen), and playlisting services like project playlist and iMeem (which is being sued by Warner Music) are examples of this “discovery/navigation” layer. I’d also add “on demand” services like Rhapsody, Napster, and Yahoo Music to this “discovery/navigation” layer except that these services are subscription based today so they don’t really work very well to drive music discovery and consumption. Imagine if Google was a paid service. It wouldn’t be driving a lot of traffic to anyone would it? I was encouraged to see that lala.com is going to try an ad supported free version of an “on demand” service. I hope it works because this is exactly what needs to happen in order to build a free music business.

The music industry should be doing all that it can to build this discovery/navigation layer because unlike the print industry, the music industry gets paid (or has the right to get paid) every time someone listens to music that is streamed over the Internet. They get paid a compulsory license if someone listens to a stream that is defined as “internet radio” which is about a tenth of a cent per listen. And they get paid a penny a listen if the song is listened to “on demand” like through Rhapsody.

I believe this fees are easily recouped via advertising once the free music business takes off. Certainly the compulsory licenses can be ad supported and I hope lala is right that on demand can be supported with ads as well.

When all this comes to pass, and I sure hope its soon, we will have an abundant free music business where all the music is available to everyone and discoverable via search and social discovery. And that business will print money just like online print media does today. The only question is whether the music companies opt to participate in that business and prosper or fight it to their death.

Additional Thoughts: Since posting this earlier, I’ve been feeling that I left several important thoughts out. The first is that eventually the music owners will be better off taking an ad revenue share than a per listen payment. That’s already part of the deal on both the compulsory license for Internet Radio and for On Demand Services but it’s an either/or based on what produces more money for the music owner. I think the music owners should take a revenue share from day one and let innovation in the free music business flourish. The upfront costs of building a free music service where you have to pay the per listen fees in advance of selling the advertising are putting a chill on the market.

The second thought is about file based music versus streaming music. File based music has to exist today because there is no good mobile broadband internet solution. When you are at the gym, in the car, on a run, you have to have files to listen to. You can’t get your music via a stream when you are on the go. But that’s going to change and I believe within five to ten year, we’ll be listening to last.fm, the hype machine, and rhapsody in our cars and iPods and phones. And when that day comes, owning files isn’t going to be necessary anymore. It’s not necessary anymore in my home. I have several hundred gigabytes of mp3s (all acquired legally by the way) in a server in my basement. We barely every listen to them. Streaming music is better because it’s abundant. I don’t own all the music in the world on my server. But almost every song ever recorded is on the Internet somewhere.

The final thought is that there will still be a market for purchased music in a world of free music services. People still buy vinyl. Some people still buy CDs including me. But so many people don’t buy music anymore that the music industry has to create a model to service that market and grow the industry instead of shrink it. I think free ad supported streaming services are that model.

When I mentioned the idea of free music to a friend in the music business, he said, aghast, “never”. Like that was the end of the music business. I believe that what has transpired over the past 10 years on the Internet tells us the exact opposite. Free music is going to be a great business. It’s just taking an awfully long time to get there.

June 2, 2007

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Here is a great note from Pamela Slim in her Escape From Cubicle Nation blog. It focuses on the need to monitor your competition, but not to use it as a way to create your own strategy. Instead of constantly trying to beat your competition through imitation and monitoring them, it is often better to use them as a reference but create your own strategy based on differentiation.

Post was found here:

http://www.escapefromcubiclenation.com/get_a_life_blog/2007/05/obsession_with_.html

Post starts here:

Obsession with the competition is a luxury of the over-funded

Any business-minded consultant or entrepreneur will tell you that you need to know about your competition. It is an important part of understanding your market and differentiating yourself from the rest of the herd.
But some business owners get so focused on every move a competitor makes that they completely lose focus on their own business. At the extreme, it is not only distracting, it is downright self-destructive.

I lived through an example of this working with a very talented artist and dance instructor in the 1990s. He was creatively brilliant and a gifted teacher. But he was completely obsessed with other instructors in the area and would fly into a rage if a student from his school left to join another school. At a certain point, he was as focused on studying, subverting and badmouthing the competition as he was on creating new art and building his own school.

I learned a number of lessons from this experience, and many others like it, working with entrepreneurs:

• When you shift focus from understanding who your competitors are to spending half your time thinking about them, you have ceded your own power. In essence, you are choosing the role of follower and not leader. Instead of obsessing over what they are doing, focus on what is exciting, special, unique and revolutionary about your own business.
• No matter how much expertise and experience you have, if your market is worth operating in, there will always be a worthy competitor. Rather than fight it, constantly look for ways that you can reshape and refine your business to match your greatest strengths and better serve your customers. If you find that there is nowhere to grow or innovate, maybe you are operating in an overripe market and should look for a new one to play in.
• No matter how secure you feel, a competitor will come along that pushes a personal button because they are smarter, younger, richer, better looking or more charismatic than you are. This is where you have a chance to put into practice what they say about the best lovers: They are most often not the suave and good-looking sports all-stars, they are the quiet, unassuming, average looking people who develop their “skills” based on reading and responding to the needs of their object of affection. Don’t let your own insecurities run away from you and cloud your business judgment. Celebrate your unique strengths and know that you are perfect just the way you are.
• Coercing customers to stay with you based on badmouthing competitors will always backfire. People like to feel they are free to make a choice about where to spend their time and money. And like a first date with a man that spews venom about his ex-wife, they will wonder how long it will take before you start spewing your venom at them. The more open and secure you are about your own business, the more secure your customers will feel with you and more likely they will stick around. Remember, if you truly want to serve your customers, you have to realize that at certain times your competitors may be a better fit. As Sting says, “When you love someone, set them free.”
• There will be times when a competitor does something that feels unethical or mean or just plain shifty. If it directly impacts your business or reputation, you must address the issue quickly and appropriately. But once it is handled, go back to focusing on the needs of your customers. If it involves legal matters, you must weigh carefully the return on investment of your time, energy and money to resolve the issue in the courts. Play out the two scenarios: if you win, will it make your business stronger and better able to serve the needs of your customers? If you lose, will you have a business to salvage? I think we often engage in legal battle more to punish the offending person rather than to achieve a desired business outcome. Don’t worry about punishment … karma takes care of that for you.
• There is nothing wrong with competition — it is all how you react to it. A business building reaction to a strong competitor would be thinking “So you want to amp up this game? Bring it on bucko, I can handle anything you throw my way.” A business destroying reaction to a strong competitor would be: “No one does that to me and gets away with it. I will crush you and everyone who supports you to prove that I am the best.”

If you are Intel, you may have an army of lawyers and consultants to track and monitor every move AMD makes. If you operate in a niche desired by Larry Ellison, you should watch your back, as you never know when he will feel like flattening your business by landing on it with one of his noisy jets.

But if you are Jane the Dog Walker with a small practice in Boise, Idaho, or Matthew the Marketing Genius in Boston, Massachusetts, your real focus should be on studying and understanding the feelings, aspirations, problems and desires of your target audience. When you do this, you will naturally grow your business in the right direction, and serve your people in a way that makes them feel truly special. And you will enjoy your life a whole lot more.

Popularity: 11% [?]

This is an interesting article about choosing your perspective correctly when you begin your marketing campaign. This is totally relevent to us as we try and figure out how we are going to market iRent2u.com. Are we marketing to the few, or the most. According to this article it would appear our service needs everyone to use it for it to work, like eBay. But I think in this circumstance we are probably different from eBay. We dont need everyone in the country to use it, only the majority of people in a specific geographic area.
But at least in that area, we do need many people using the site to make it truly effective. In that case then it appears our strategy needs to be, according to this article, to be exceptional first of all. Then after standing out we need to amplify the excitement of the few and make it easy for them to spread the story to the caring majority.

Does this make sense for iRent2u.com?

Article Found Here:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/05/one_a_few_most_.html
Article Starts Here:

There are four kinds of marketing situations, and the approach to each is radically different. Yet most of the time, we lump them together as just plain ‘marketing’.

If you are trying to sell a house or fill a job, you only need to persuade one person.

If you want to make your book sell a bunch of copies, your restaurant to be filled on Saturday night or your coaching practice to have a full schedule, you need to sell a few people.

On the other hand, viral bestsellers, killer websites and essential conferences hit their stride when most people in a marketplace have been converted. You can’t get elected President (most years, anyway) without persuading most of the people who vote.

Lastly, when the market is defined right, there are situation in which you need to persuade all of the people involved. If you need 51 Senators to agree with you on a bill, or if you need the purchasing committee at a big company to buy your software, then you need a unanimous decision.

This four-way distinction is important for two reasons. First, because you often have a choice. You can choose which approach your venture will take on its way to accomplishing its goals. Gandhi didn’t need most of the people to change India, he instead relied on a smaller few, but with more passion than most politicians are able to generate.

You could, for example, plan a business that works once almost everyone adopts it (like eBay) or you could alter the business so it works just fine if a much smaller universe of people embrace it (like threadless). Worth noting that neither business would work if just a few people showed up. 37Signals has done a great job of designing web products that only need to be sold to a few people, and then those people do the hard work of getting everyone in their organization to use them.

Here’s a quick list of how the four differ:

ONE: You’re a needle, the market is a haystack. Make your needle as sharp as you can, put it in as many haystacks as you can afford. Alternatively, you’ve already decided on your one (the date for the prom or the perfect job). In that case, throw the haystack out and engage in a custom, one-on-one patient effort to tell your story to the person who needs to hear it.

A FEW: Being exceptional matters most. Stand out, don’t fit in. Shun the non-believers.

MOST: Amplify the excitement of the few and make it easy for them to spread the story to the caring majority.

ALL: Compromise. You need to be many things to many people, embraced by the passionate but not offensive to the masses. Sooner or later, the issue for the reluctant part of the buyer community is that it becomes more expensive/risky to stand in the way of the group than it is to go along.

Blogs, for now, are almost always about the few. Google and Starbucks and the iPod are exciting stories because they’ve moved from the few to the most. The most important industry trade shows make huge profits because they’ve transitioned to the all.

Choose wisely, and realize that as you succeed, the game will change.

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