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Seth Godin has an interesting post called “One, a few, most or all” where he discusses about what he calls the 4 situations in marketing. He makes this distinction based on who you need to influence. As the un-initiated (aka, not a marketing guy) I know that you have to be aware of your audience and potential customer, but after reading this post it makes it completely clear that you have to approach each situation differently in order to succeed. Here are the situations:

1. One. When you need to fill a job or sell a house you only need to convince one person.
2. Few. When you want to be the hot local restaurant, or sell many copies of a book, or be a popular TV show you have to convince quite a few people.
3. Most. Some businesses only work when a large number of people participate: LinkedIN, Ebay, Paypal, YouTube for example, or a telephone company or the mail service.
4. All. When you need to convince all of a panel or group in order to win, for example to specific your product as an industry requirement, or you need the support of 51 senators to pass your bill, or you need a town council to approve your building permit.

Thinking more about this specific grouping, it is very evident that you need to know which situation you are in before you develop your strategy. Sometimes this situation will be determined by business model economics, while in other cases this might be determined be product maturity, % market share, or legislative situation. In all cases knowing your situation will help you to develop a strategy that is more aligned with your goal.

• C an you identify which of your potential product or service offerings might fall into these categories?
• How does your strategy for approaching and intereacting with a customer change with respect to what situation you are in?
• Do certain market segments always fall into the same marketing situations?

It was unfortunate that I found this great example of innovation through through a tradegy. Engadet has a post on the unfortunate death of a man while operating this piece of equipment. The piece of equipment is the Spider radio controller slope mower. made by Dvorak Machine Division.

First let me point out that this particular unit is a radio controlled unit and not a robot per se, but a remote controlled machine (more like an RC car).

What caught my eye was the innovative nature of this piece of equipment and how it is an interesting solution to a well-defined niche market in the lawn care world. It is very common to find steep embandments and slopes around roadways, overpasses, dams, reseviors, lakes, or other municipal areas. If you look at what are the alternatives and current incumbents in the area mowing slopes, you will see the uniqueness of this offering by Dvorak.

Although I can’t quote direct prices, the spider looks like it could have a significantly lower cost of ownership than the usual tractor-swing arm or standard ride-on slope mowers. The productivity for the spider versus the hand held trimmer was approximately 6-1 from the spider commercial video at their site. It really changes the user expectation in terms of mode of interface, capital investment, and operator safety (in the long term). It is also interesting in that it might be much more successful than other remote controlled mowers (examples of few robotic lawnmowers). The key here is that most people initially think to replace the largest volume of mower on the market which is the home user base. In this setting the concept of a remote controlled mower is a luxury and feature overkill. Where in the specific market of slope mowing The Spider offers a unique value proposition when you compare the Spider Slope Mower to the rest of the market. This is an example of a disruptive technology to this particular sub-segment the lawn care market.

This is about a recent post from Guy Kawasaki about his experiences in starting a new site based on use provided content. The basic premise is the stats on his new site truemors.com. The biggest shock to most people was that the total cost of the site was around $12K to set and get operational (as Guy call this credit card magnitude debt). There is a whole list of 26 stats and an accompanying slide presentation. The last stat caught my eye in that it was the 4 things that Guy learned from this experience:

1. There’s really no such thing as bad PR.
2. $12,000 goes a very long way these days.
3. You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away.
4. Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.

I would say Guy’s success is certainly quite a bit different from the average joe that might try the same thing as he has a extremely popular blog from which he could launch this site.   So the amount of traffic and the speed to grow a base of users may have been faster than what a less popular person may have been capable of.

On the other hand the low cost of entry was quite eye opening as he was able to implement his concept to a usable and growable state with the funds that are within reach of a large portion of the industrialized world.

So what idea for the web do you have that could be launched or at least prototyped for this kidn of money?