Niche Down to Scale Up

Several years ago, we built a collaborative email tool called Outpost, and it failed spectacularly. We’d initially built it for ourselves as an internal tool and then decided to turn it into a “real product” that we could sell to other small businesses.

The product felt like it filled a real need. After all, we needed the product to solve our own problem and that’s why we built our own solution. The logic was that if we needed it, surely many other small businesses with small teams replying to customer emails would also need it. 

We’d felt the pain of trying to use the standard ticketing solutions that were overbuilt and expensive. We also knew that many small businesses often tried to just share a login to their Gmail accounts with several employees as a way to let multiple employees do customer service, but that had its own set of problems and didn’t really offer real collaboration.

So, we built a solution. And, it was a pretty good product. But, we struggled to sell. We landed customers, but not at the rate that we had expected. And, after a year or so of struggling to make it work we decided we needed to throw in the towel and focus on other things. 

Initially, we wondered what had gone wrong. We’d followed the classic startup playbook: Identify a problem and develop a solution. We’d even ensured that we were solving our own problem so that we were “eating our own dog food”, as they say - that is, using our own product.

Now, looking back, the problem is clear. While we’d identified a problem and solution, we hadn’t spent enough time defining the third leg of the product stool. That third leg is a specific target market. 

We’d defined our target market as “small businesses that reply to customer email” and this was simply too broad. We hadn’t truly defined who our customer was, what specific problems they had, and how to reach them. 

It’s as if Nike, when they were a young business, had said that their target market was everyone who had feet. Instead, they focused on competitive track athletes. They knew exactly who their customer was, what their needs were and they catered to them. Over time, as we all well know, they expanded their market and grew the company. But, they started small with a very specific customer in mind and that’s what enabled them to grow.

For our email product, we should have been much more specific. We should have targeted small software companies with 30 or fewer employees. Or perhaps boutique online clothing retailers with less than $1 million in revenue. If we’d been specific about who were building for and who we were selling to, we may have found success. Instead, we tried to please everyone and failed.

As you think about your business, think about focusing on a very specific customer. Pick a small, specific group of people as your target customer. Figure out their needs and how to market specifically to them. And then, once you have success there, start to expand. 

Thinking small is how you’ll become big.

Grants to Help You Scale in 2026