Hire the Right Customers #

Find the core market for your application and focus solely on them #

The customer is not always right. The truth is you have to sort out who's right and who's wrong for your app. The good news is that the internet makes finding the right people easier than ever.

If you try to please everyone, you won't please anyone #

When we built Basecamp we focused our marketing on design firms. By narrowing our market this way, we made it more likely to attract passionate customers who, in turn, would evangelize the product. Know who your app is really intended for and focus on pleasing them.

The Best Call We Ever Made #

The decision to aim Campaign Monitor strictly at the web design market was the best call we ever made. It allowed us to easily identify which features would be genuinely useful and, more importantly, which features to leave out. Not only have we attracted more customers by targeting a smaller group of people, these customers all have similar needs which makes our job much easier. There are loads of features in Campaign Monitor that would be useless to anyone but a web designer.

Focusing on a core market also makes it much easier to spread the word about your software. Now that we have a tightly defined audience, we can advertise where they frequent online, publish articles they might find interesting, and generally build a community around our product.

—David Greiner, founder, Campaign Monitor