A minimum viable audience is the smallest possible market you can serve and that can sustain your business as it grows. It’s about targeting the people who will particularly benefit from what you are offering.
Creating something that people care about (your minimum viable audience) is much more difficult. What you really want is someone in love with your product. The emotion of love is very strong and it doesn’t comes for commodities. It comes for brand and small business. Small business are special because you the owners personality is visible. Your business is an extension of your personality.
In one of the recent conversations with our clients about the vision of our company 73bit.com. She mentioned this is a little limiting … wouldn’t you want to support everyone, not just analyst? My answer was Yes, this is by choice because we have been working so closing with you all we think there are some specific needs we understand that makes us a good technology partner. We have an initial estimates that there is about 50K to 100K Sustainability analyst in the world right now and we are happy to see how many of them we can serve first. To be honest with you we are happy running a good size small business and we will call ourselves successful when we have 100 clients + good profit margin. Thus 50K to 100K Sustainability analyst will keep us busy to discovery our first 100 clients.
There is this amazing inclination towards the number 100. Even though we have 15 active clients we have a team of 20 members to serve them. It shows that the business is a practice. It’s very difficult to scale. It’s a super niche market and the product we have is not an urgent need. It’s even difficult to explain for someone who is new to our sustainability space.
It rather makes more sense to identify something that would be useful to 100 clients that they use almost every day, happy to pay monthly and brag about it with their friends too. It’s almost difficult to do that. It needs market insights, timing and good leverage. It would be interesting if we can solve some burning problem of each person for which they pay us premium per day. Even if that means we solve there problem only 2-3 times per year.
The intresting part of focusing on finding first 100 clients is you may feel that you have closed the opportunity to the world. It’s exactly opposite it’s about finding and fixing the burning problem in few people’s work. Becoming the change that your first 100 clients seek to gain. Learning the patterns that you can use later to see if there are others groups who need these solution. The company like slack and basecamp were started to serve tech industry. Now they have millions of users world wide.
Our vision is to help every sustainability analyst find insights with affordable data science ~ 73bit.com
Vikram Shetty 