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For most things, there aren't 50k reachable, aware, motivated, solvent buyers. Making enough people aware of your existence may be more expensive than the total profits made from your endeavour.

I am only pointing this out because I know people who would hear the first part of your comment and get their egos attached to an idea since they interpret it as 'there are billions of people, so I only need a tiny percentage, there is no bad idea, only bad execution' and lose years of their lives pursuing something where odds are stacked against them, if there were any odds in the first place. I'd urge people instead to also hear the 2nd part of your comment, and take it as 'experiment with many niche things, there are some that land and land well'.

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I wouldn't agree there. One important thing that works in your favor is that there's an inverse relationship between marketing costs and market size, and a big part of that is because of a similar inverse relationship with word of mouth. Even the most fringe topic you could think of is generally going to have communities built up around it, and the more niche - the more 'airtime' ideas that cater to that community are going to get. Like in this case - his 'marketing' was a Reddit post and a Discord, for a total marketing spend of $0.

By contrast when appealing to a large market, marketing becomes a major part of breaking through simply because word of mouth is much more difficult to get going when you're vying for a market that a million other competitors, many quite competent themselves, are also vying for. To go with the games example again, if you're trying to create a platformer - you're probably going to fail, even if you create a pretty good game. It's just a completely oversaturated market, even if that market is massive. By contrast if you're making e.g. a Starflight clone - you're probably going to succeed if it's even remotely decent. It's very niche, but consequently also very underserved market with tremendous word of mouth potential.

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