Posted by mikezillion at March 3rd, 2008

Have I mentioned recently how much I love Seth Godin? He’s the marketing guru who’s fond of pointing out that the best way to build a market is to make something that people will either love or hate, and ignore products aimed at the middle.

His latest gem came in the briefest of blog entries:

the products and services that succeed wildly are the ones that everyone expected would fail

He followed this up with some examples, including The Beatles, in a later blog posting.

It seems to me that the barrier to success used to be access to the tools to make and publish your dream. Now, it’s just the genuine passion you feel about what you do, and the stubbornness to believe that you are right in the face of your first seven or so market failures. Seven is an arbitrary number, but the idea is that you put enough examples out there until your unique slice of the planet discovers you and recognizes that you’re the only one giving them exactly what they are looking for.