Startup: An Insider's Guide to Launching and Running a Business by Kevin Ready

storm the main gate? Do you try to climb the 80-foot-high walls on the south side? What if you noticed a gap at the corner of one of the walls—wouldn’t it be better to hit the gap, the opening, the weak spot where your effort for entry would be least?
    Of course it would be. And marketing is no different. Look for a niche that has been overlooked or underserviced by other players in the market. Choose that as your entry point.
    Once you get started, make it your objective to burrow in so deeply that you come to “own” it. Once other players notice you are gaining ground and profiting from your strategy, you are already months ahead. In many markets, this is enough protection to survive if you are committed to constant evolution—always looking for new angles. If people follow your lead and move on your niche so long as you have been adapting, morphing, and improving all along, it will hopefully be difficult for them to catch up. This strategy often forces larger players to just buy you outright instead of trying to follow you. This sequence of events worked very well with our apartment real estate site: we found a niche, burrowed into it, and then were bought by a larger competitor.
    While the niche strategy is a common one, not all markets are going to have a clearly defined niche approach. Sometimes the best plan is to march up to the main gate of that castle and start battering the door down. It should go without saying that this type of approach is often best suited to well-funded and highly resourced operations.
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    What Separates a Hobby from a Business?
    Your customers are your reason for being. If I wanted to sound snooty I would say that customers are your raison d’être—your reason for being. (Give me a moment to fetch my smoking jacket and brandy snifter.) Customers are important. If you think about it, customers and their willingness to pay you are the only things that separate your business from being a hobby. A hobby is nothing more than an activity you do that nobody pays you for. If you love fly fishing, you can promote that outdoorsy pastime from a hobby to a business just by getting people to pay you to show them how to fly fish, guide them to great trout streams, and so on.
    It all comes down to the customer—to his or her willingness to listen to your message, process what it means, and then decide to fork over hard-earned cash. You have to love it when people choose to spend time with your product, and willingly pay you money for it. And in case you are wondering, no, customers are not always right. They should, however, almost always get what they want—and they should be permanently installed as the rotating, shining center of your business’s solar system.
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    Will You Be a Whale or an Eskimo?
    Eskimos traditionally depended on killing one or two whales to survive for a whole year. They risked everything on being successful in this task. Whales, on the other hand, survive by eating millions of tiny shrimp. A failure to captureany one, any thousand, or even any ten thousand of those shrimp will not matter to the whale’s survival.
    Businesses can operate in either mode. You can position your product so that you need only a few large clients, or so that you need to acquire many small-value clients. This is a fundamental point of analysis when deciding what business to pursue, or how to position an existing operation or product offering for future growth and stability. Neither of these options is right or wrong; each carries its good and bad points.
    Early on, you are faced with a choice of which approach to take. In most cases, your expertise, product, or value proposition will dictate to you which of these choices is most appropriate. It is most common for businesses these days (especially online) to default to the mode of going for lots of relatively small transactions. It is very useful to recognize that both of these distinctions exist, and simply make a