Just segment your market, ok?

But my product can help everyone!

For some reason, the idea of segmenting the market is terrifying for a lot of startups. By segmenting, I mean identifying a very specific type of business that would get the most value out of your product… and then focusing all marketing and sales efforts on businesses that fit the criteria you’ve identified. 

Founders assume that doing this will forever relegate them to tiny markets, preventing them from becoming the next Google, or from being acquired by Google. This topic is on my mind because I was just reading an article about Facebook in The Atlantic — and, for the record, the topic of this article was literally that Facebook is way too large and has way to much control over humans on earth. So I thought it would be useful to share this excerpt from the article: 

Early constraints around membership—the requirement at first that users attended Harvard, and then that they attended any Ivy League school, and then that they had an email address ending in .edu—offered a sense of cohesiveness and community.

Yes, the company that is now so huge that over a quarter of the world’s population uses it initially restricted itself to an absolutely minuscule market — current Harvard students. 

The truth for most B2B startups is that they don’t need to close 10,000 deals in the next 12 months. In fact, if they even approached that level of demand it would be problematic. Choosing a very specific market now does not mean you can’t expand to other markets in the future. It does mean you’ll have an easier time getting traction now and building a customer base that you can build on in the future.

What might a market segment look like for a company in the K8s space? It could be:

  • Companies that are merging engineering teams and running in both AWS and Azure as a result of a merger or acquisition

  • Companies using Kubernetes for HIPAA-compliant workloads

  • Gaming companies

Note that only one of those examples is a ‘vertical’ (and I chose gaming because the industry has very specific technical requirements, especially around latency, that others don’t). Size of company is rarely a great way to segment a market. But segmenting your market based on the types of companies that will get the most value out of your company is always a good idea. 

Need help figuring out how to segment your market? That’s what I do. 


Emily Omier