I cannot believe why so many people are so enamored with Seth Goldin's grossly glorified common sense.
* Word spreads.
No shit. Word of mouth, that is really important.
* Needs are similar.
Wow you need to pick a market with multiple customers. Brilliant!!!
* Budgets exist.
Make sure your Customers have money! Don't know if you guys know this, if your customers don't have money, they cannot pay you!
* Barriers exist.
Who has not heard of barriers to entry? Well IMHO, barrier to entry from the technology standpoint is not that important. There are many programmer than can make twitter, youtube, wordpress clones...etc. Execution is more crucial
Once you've established yourself as a genius of some sort, you get to go all Zen, and write columns like 'Remember to tie your shoelaces because if you don't, you might trip - now, what are your business's shoelaces?' The more glaringly obvious your insights, the more you'll be lauded as someone who cares about 'the little guy' instead of some high-falutin' elitist. Journalists love this stuff because 'guru' articles write themselves...
In person, Godin is a chameleon, alternating between monkish calm and bursts of hyper-creativity. He looks at my voice recorder with amusement. 'Do you ever listen back to more than the first 15 minutes?' he asks, eyes a-twinkle. No, I sheepishly admit. [...]
As I leave, I feel a gentle hand on my arm. 'Your shoelace is untied,' says Godin. I look down and he's right: it is. I kneel to re-tie it, an almost automatic act; but as I stand up, a wave of realization bursts over me: this is the lesson he's been trying to communicate for the last hour. And it's one that I'll never find in my voice recorder.
I'd love to see a blog post that focuses on the 'barriers exist' point. Maybe some case studies.
I guess there are a range of levels of barriers to entry, and any example of high barrier to entry I can think of implies you've already done a lot of work yourself. Very often, this might be because of a previous job / study gave you some specific valuable domain knowledge, and / or contacts (eg google).
Other times not. For example, the sydney harbour bridge climb - there high barriers to entry here, they have a monpoly! but to get that monopoly they had to put in a lot of hard work convincing the relevant authorities to let them do it.
