What Marketers Don’t Understand About Critical Mass - For The Interested

What Marketers Don’t Understand About Critical Mass

“Most marketers are fooling themselves. They imagine that the audience size necessary for critical mass is right around the corner, but it’s actually closer to infinity. That, like a boat with a leak, you always have to keep bailing to keep it afloat. If you don’t design for a low critical mass, you’re unlikely to get one.”

Once again, Seth Godin challenges the conventional wisdom about marketing.

In this post, he explains why a key to successful marketing is to focus on attracting minimum critical mass for your product — it’s to build something where the number of people necessary for it to work is as low as possible.

He offers examples of products that have achieved this such as Facebook (it only needed 100 users to eventually conquer the Harvard campus, which then was enough for it to go on and conquer the world), and his book Purple Cowwhich was seeded to just 5,000 people and went on to sell millions of copies.