Right-Sizing Market Focus

One of the most difficult things to do for a startup is to right-size your market focus. If you go too narrow, no matter how deep you go, you’ll never be interesting enough to substantiate your existence as a business nor grow beyond a few paying customers. If you go too broad, you’ll never grow deep enough to get paying customers in sufficient numbers.

In our market, since we started AccelerEyes 6 years ago, we’ve seen other startups in our space die off due to problems with their size of market focus.

Too Narrow/Deep Example

In ATDC, there was another company also focused on accelerating scientific functions on GPUs. However, they chose only to focus on a niche application in neuroscience and only built a handful of functions (some ODE solvers) that could run on the GPU. They got a >$1M government SBIR grant because they were good at going deep and had expertise, but when the grant money ran out they were too narrow and deep to survive.

Too Broad Example

Other players in the market that came before us decided to build a much broader set of functionality, but they targeted an overly huge array of parallel devices, including multi-core, IBM Cell processors, AMD GPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, and more. Even though they raised substantial amounts of venture capital, they were spread too thin and were unable to go deep enough fast enough to win customers at the rate the VCs expected.

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Many startups die because of poor sized focus.

At AccelerEyes, we’ve constantly debated the size of our focus and that debate coupled with our bootstrapping mindset has worked well for us.

What are your thoughts on right-sizing your market focus? Have you seen startups in your market die due to poorly sized focus?

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