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In January 2010, when Ben Silbermann launched Pinterest, his initial growth strategy was to target his techie friends. He first emailed friends to let them know about his new site that lets you organize and share the things you love. “What’s the point?” they all asked. He then emailed all of his co-founders’ friends on the East Coast. No one cared. He emailed everybody he knew from his last job at Google, and all of his wife’s friends at Facebook.

“No one really got it, to be totally honest with you. But they were also very polite about it. ‘This looks interesting. Very interesting,’ they’d say.”

He then started spending time at Apple stores, where he switched the default home pages on every laptop to Pinterest.com and stood in the back saying, “Wow! This Pinterest thing is really blowing up.” Didn’t work.

Ben started to realize that maybe tech people had no interest in what he was building. But there was an unexpected demographic that seemed to get it, as Ben shared at a talk at Startup School:

“There was a small group of people who were really enjoying it. Those folks would not be who you’d think of stereotypically as early adopters. They were folks I grew up with. People that were using it for regular life stuff: What is my house going to look like? What kind of food do I want to eat?”

On a whim, Ben decided to attend a conference in Salt Lake City called Alt Summit, a large female-focused design and blogging conference. He walked the halls pitching Pinterest and began to see a bit of interest. Eventually he met a woman named Victoria Smith who had a blog called SFGirlByBay. She quickly saw the potential of Pinterest, and they decided to collaborate on a promotion: Victoria created a Pinterest board with all the things that mean “home” to her and then tagged other bloggers to do the same. Each blog had a small but rabid fan base, and their audiences loved it. They got Pinterest. Soon they started to use it for all kinds of other things, and just a year later, Pinterest was at over a million users.

Throughout this journey, the product itself didn’t meaningfully change—the audience did. Ben initially assumed that a new tech website would resonate with tech employees. Instead, 30-something female bloggers turned out to be the ideal early adopters.

When deciding who to go after when just starting out, it’s important to be super-specific. You need to find your “super-specific who”.

As Andy Johns (former growth leader at Facebook, Twitter, Wealthfront, and Quora) put it:

“When it comes to the question of the target customer, the most common mistake is the definition is too broad. It must be almost comically narrow, to the point where you may be misunderstood for such a narrow focus.

At Wealthfront, our initial target customer was an engineer at a pre-IPO tech company, typically between 25 and 35 years old, less than $1M net worth, and had a personal preference to delegate money management to a trusted third party.”

Michael Seibel shared the same lesson from his time at Justin.TV (60-second clip):

As did Andy Rachleff (co-founder of Benchmark):

“If you want to build a big business, you don’t go after the big market first, because those people only buy based on references, and you don’t have the references. You need to create a beachhead, a niche you can dominate. Through references, you grow from that niche of early adopters.”

As did Paul Graham:

“Usually your initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would probably already exist.”

April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome) calls this your “customers who care”:

“There is likely a wide range of buyers that care about that value, but certain customers care a lot more than others. What are the characteristics of a customer that makes them care a lot about your differentiated value? That gives us an idea of who our best-fit customers are. Your best-fit target customers are customers that really care a lot about your unique value.”

And Julie Supan (GTM advisor to YouTube, Airbnb, Dropbox, Discord, and Thumbtack) calls this your “high-expectation customer”:

“The high-expectation customer, or HXC, is the most discerning person within your target demographic. It’s someone who will acknowledge—and enjoy—your product or service for its greatest benefit.

They look things up. They research things. And they have ideas for new types of products or services that can help them save money, gain time, get healthier, or make their team more productive. If your product exceeds their expectations, it can meet everyone else’s.”