The following is a chapter from Ryan Holiday’s new book, The Perennial Seller, a fascinating look at what it takes to help books, tech projects and art that last. In this chapter he discusses the questions that no startup founders ask before they begin work.
For more background on the book I encourage you to visit his post about how he made the book over a grueling (and fun) two-year period.
The critic Toby Litt could have been talking about all bad art and bad products when he said that “bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self.” Bad startups are the same. They aren’t actually businesses, they are self-indulgent playthings that do nothing for no one heatvape.
In my library I have a little book called Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof. Unless you’re a permaculture nerd, there’s no reason you’d have heard of this book. That’s the whole point—the book is for permaculture nerds, or at least aspiring ones. This might not seem like a big niche but this indie-published engine-that-could has gone on to sell some 165,000 copies (more than most books will ever sell) and is still in print some thirty-five years after publication. It’s on its second expanded and revised edition—the first came fifteen years after initial release, the second twenty years after that. It’s the kind of perennial seller that all authors aspire to—indeed that creators of all types should aspire to. The author made something that lasted and she made something that will continue to last (unless society suddenly stops producing garbage).
This kind of success doesn’t happen accidentally, and it’s not the result of marketing either. Her book, like many other perennial products—from Craigslist to Pixar movies—is a conceptualization success story. They didn’t bump into their audience or lasting success, they aimed for it. They built around it.
Yet if you ask most creators the relatively simply question: “Who is this for?” they can’t give you an answer. They cannot fill in this very basic sentence: “This is a ______ that does ______ for ______.”Over the years, my firm Brass Check has worked with many hundreds of startups, writers and makers. I’ve asked clients this very question many times. As a writer myself, I’m always shocked at the answer. Because these people have spent hundreds of hours working on something without ever stopping to ask who the hell they are making it for. If they had, they wouldn’t give me answers like:
· “Everyone”
· “You know, smart people”
· “Malcolm Gladwell fans”
· “Myself”
The problem with those answers is not just that they are vague (“smart people”) or ridiculous (“myself”); it’s that such audiences don’t exist. There is no convention where Malcolm Gladwell fans get together. They don’t all read the same website. Just as every politician has to create his or her own coalition in order to win, no creator can magically inherit the audience of another. Whatever you’re making is not for “everyone” either—not even the Bible is for everyone. For yourself? Are you honestly satisfied selling just one unit?
Paul Graham famously wrote that “having no specific user in mind” is one of the eighteen major mistakes that kills startups: “A surprising number of founders seem willing to assume that someone— they’re not sure exactly who—will want what they’re building. Do the founders want it? No, they’re not the target market. Who is? Teenagers. People interested in local events (that one is a perennial tar pit). Or ‘business’ users. What business users? Gas stations? Movie studios? Defense contractors?”
At least those answers are plainly wrong or unspecific . The most common response is even more alarming. It’s the creator who answers the audience question with:
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it.”
If you haven’t thought about who your product is actually for, then what the hell have you been thinking about?
Successful products know who they are for–not generally, but specifically. Even the ones that have ambitious long-term goal to monopolize a broad and large market with a big audience, start with much smaller ones. As Peter Thiel outlines in Zero to One, the key often to start by dominating a small niche where you have a specific audience. Facebook started on Harvard and expanded to other campuses to now global dominance. As he put it, “Dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision.” I like to think of it as concentric circles: Each small audience is contained inside a potentially larger audience. It’s like the line from Sex and the City (which happens to make Lady Gaga’s career trajectory quite well): “First come the gays. Then the girls. Then . . . the industry.”
When Susan Cain sat down to create a book about introversion, she had a very specific audience in mind: introverts. This was also a traditionally underserved audience, which is even better from a positioning perspective (when supply is down, demand is high). The result was Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking—a publishing sensation that has not only moved in excess of two million copies, but spurred courses, leadership consulting, and a viral TED talk that has been watched more than 14 million times.
In the same way, the Left Behind series is obviously for Christians. Its films, novels, graphic novels, video games, and albums are preaching with a very specific choir in mind. Cannibal Holocaust, on the other hand, is a dark and twisted horror film meant for the most extreme horror fans—it’s certainly not for highbrow critics or average theatergoers.
The Blue Collar Comedy Tour (with well-known Southern comedians), The Three Amigos Tour (with well-known Latino comedians), The Original Kings of Comedy Tour (with well-known black comedians) and the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour (with well-known Middle Eastern comedians) were all aimed at very specific ethnic and social groups. Since 2009, ABC has taken a similar approach with its weeknight programming. They developed a series of family sitcoms that target discrete segments of their overall viewership. Modern Family (2009) is about a mixed family featuring different types of modern relationships. The Middle (2009) is about a struggling Midwestern working class family. The Goldbergs (2013) is a nostalgic show about family life in the 1980s. Black-ish (2014) is about a suburban, upper-middle class black family . Fresh Off the Boat (2015) is about an immigrant Asian family trying to make it in suburban Florida. Obviously each one of these shows appeals to larger audiences but they would not success without first nailing the proposition for their first and most important audiences.
If you haven’t thought about how your product(s) do this, then again I ask, what have you thought about? Presumably you have some vision of people purchasing or using this thing you’ve spent all your time making. How could you not know who they are? It’s not going to happen by accident!
The single most important consideration a creator can make with their project is to sit down and think about who its for. Not after they’re finished and they’re trying to market it, but right now, before they’ve even begun.

She said nothing, just took Leon's hand and walked the boy over to the children's section.

"But Mom," Shadow heard Leon say, "It wasn't pressed igitation. It wasn't. I saw it vanish and then it fell out of his nose. I saw it."

An oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln gazed down from the wall at him. Shadow walked down the marble and oak steps to the library basement, through a door into a large room filled with tables, each table covered with books of all kinds, indiscriminately assorted and promiscuously arranged: paperbacks and hardcovers, fiction and nonfiction, periodicals and encyclopedias all side by side upon the tables, spines up or spines out.


Shadow wandered to the back of the room where there was a table covered with old-looking leather-bound books, each with a catalog number painted in white on the spine. "You're the first person over in that corner all day," said the man sitting by the stack of empty boxes and bags and the small, open metal cashbox. "Mostly folk just take the thrillers and the children's books and the Harlequin romances. Jenny Kerton, Danielle Steel, all that." The man was reading Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. "Everything on the tables is fifty cents a book, or you can take three for a dollar."

Shadow thanked him and continued to browse. He found a copy of Herodotus's Histories bound in peeling brown leather. It made him think of the paperback copy he had left behind in prison. There was a book called Perplexing Parlour Illusions, which looked like it might have some coin effects. He carried both the books over to the man with the cashbox.

"Buy one more, it's still a dollar," said the man. "And if you take another book away, you'll be doing us a favor. We need the shelf-space."

Shadow walked back to the old leather-bound books. He decided to liberate the book that was least likely to be bought by anyone else, and found himself unable to decide between Common Diseases of the Urinary Tract with Illustrations by a Medical Doctor and Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872-1884. He looked at the illustrations in the medical book and decided that somewhere in the town there was a teenage boy who could use the book to gross out his friends. He took the Minutes to the man on the door, who took his dollar and put all the books into a Dave's Finest Food brown paper sack.

Shadow left the library. He had a clear view of the lake, all the way back. He could even see his apartment building, like a doll's house, up past the bridge. And there were men on the ice near the bridge, four or five of them, pushing a dark green car into the center of the white lake.

"March the twenty-third," Shadow said to the lake, under his breath. "Nine A.M. to nine-thirty A.M." He wondered if the lake or the klunker could hear him-and if they would pay any attention to him, even if they could. He doubted it.

Officer Chad Mulligan was waiting outside Shadow's apartment when he got back. Shadow's heart began to pound when he saw the police car, to relax a little when he observed that the policeman was doing paperwork in the front seat.

The road went up a hill and we got into thick woods, and the road kept on climbing. Sometimes it dipped down but rose again steeply. All the time we heard the cattle in the woods. Finally, the road came out on the top of the hills. We were on the top of the height of land that was the highest part of the range of wooded hills we had seen from Burguete. There were wild strawberries growing on the sunny side of the ridge in a little clearing in the trees.

Ahead the road came out of the forest and went along the shoulder of the ridge of hills. The hills ahead were not wooded, and there were great fields of yellow gorse. Way off we saw the steep bluffs, dark with trees and jutting with gray stone, that marked the course of the Irati River.

"We have to follow this road along the ridge, cross these hills, go through the woods on the far hills, and come down to the Irati valley," I pointed out to Bill.


"It's too far to go and fish and come back the same day, comfortably."

"Comfortably. That's a nice word. We'll have to go like hell to get there and back and have any fishing at all."

It was a long walk and the country was very fine, but we were tired when we came down the steep road that led out of the wooded hills into the valley of the Rio de la Fabrica.

The road came out from the shadow of the woods into the hot sun. Ahead was a river-valley. Beyond the river was a steep hill. There was a field of buckwheat on the hill. We saw a white house under some trees on the hillside. It was very hot and we stopped under some trees beside a dam that crossed the river.

Bill put the pack against one of the trees and we jointed up the rods, put on the reels, tied on leaders, and got ready to fish.