Acknowledging the Time When a Person Finds a Successful Entrepreneurial Thought

One point in the article that really turned my gaze to taking in ALL the ways innovation can occur was in the point of Philips changing how their light bulbs can be disposed of. It seems like a backward approach to changing your product or developing an advantage but in their case it was quite advantageous to create an alternative superior way to dispose of their product. That created an incentive to use the Philips product knowing the ease of removing them. This really opened my eyes to the other ways a product measure of very similarly to its competitors but with twists in the maintenance or disposal of the products could sustain a business. I was mainly concerned with how I will get my information and provide it to musicians, but another way I could concern myself with is if I base my distribution and information sharing like CARFAX. There are other ways to provide my service, paper, e-mail, fax, PDF, log-in / web authentication to certain parts of the database, etc. I have just relied on replicating the format of CARFAX.

Something I else I was blind to before was taking the real scope of a target population. Under the write up on Different form and function, same objective it spoke on listing a total group of alternative products and customers. The reason is to see the total market, not only the consumers you specifically target but other customers you could steal from other industries and related fields, its not just about direct competition. I see a major advantage to keeping your peripheral competition in mind for understanding the larger picture but I contradict myself in thought. It seems the success lies in segmenting the marketing and choosing a smaller segment to dominate at first and build up data before you generalize your service and expand. But by choosing a small segment of the market, I acknowledge my collateral influence would be minimal depending on how small I segment. I think the segmenting domination is for the development and beginning and the consumer poaching is for when a stronger product identity is achieved and delivered.

The article makes an excellent point of stating how if you start small and don't have a lot of people buying your product, then most likely it won't spread as well. Leading me to believe that going big or going home are my 2 options....

What do you think is more important, specific consumer data, aka response from specific segmented market, or taking a leap at the "selling a million or none" approach that the article discusses?