Your idea needs an easy-to-reach audience

Your idea needs an easy-to-reach audience. By that I mean, when you think about the potential customers for your idea/product, this potential audience needs to be easy to reach. Here are three examples:

  • College students are easy to reach. You can walk onto campus and put up posters, you can use flyers, you can chalk sidewalks, you can put up a table somewhere to give away free samples, you can advertise in the student newspaper or on a campus web site, you can schedule a lecture on campus, etc. If you can get your product selling on one campus, you know you can scale up to hundreds of other large campuses. This is exactly how Facebook started. The first campus was Harvard. Then other campuses got on board, then it was opened to the general public. A perfect example of, “Think big, start small and scale.”
  • Nursing homes are easy to reach. They are located in physical buildings with known addresses and there is very likely to be a receptionist at the door. You can call or walk in.
  • Hiring managers are easy to reach. Any company of any size has people in the recruiting role, and these people are usually easy to find.
  • And so on

If you choose an idea that has an easy-to-reach audience, you often make your life easier as an entrepreneur.