Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Start with a too-small market
Every monopoly dominates a large share of its market, so every startup should begin with a very small one. The ideal target is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Once a company dominates that niche, it expands into related and slightly broader markets.
Amazon shows how. Jeff Bezos's founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, and he very deliberately started with books. At the hedge fund D. E. Shaw, he and David Shaw talked about what they could build to take advantage of the internet's explosive growth, and the code name for what became Amazon was the Everything Store. Amazon then added categories gradually until it became the world's general store.
Sequencing markets correctly takes discipline. The most successful companies make this progression a part of their founding narrative, first dominating a specific niche and then scaling into adjacent markets.
Why did Amazon begin with books?
Amazon opened in July 1995 after Bezos founded it in a garage in Bellevue, Washington, the year before. Books suited an online store because roughly 3 million titles were in print, far more than any physical bookstore could stock. Two large wholesalers, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, already kept catalogs of nearly all of them. The early tagline called it Earth's Biggest Bookstore.
How did Amazon widen beyond books?
Amazon added music and videos in 1998, then toys, electronics, and software over the following year. In 2000 it opened its marketplace to outside sellers, who now account for more than half of units sold on the site by the company's own reports. Amazon Web Services launched in 2006 as a separate business built on the company's own computing infrastructure.
What is the bowling alley strategy?
Consultant Geoffrey Moore described it in his 1991 book Crossing the Chasm. A company first wins one narrow segment, then uses its customers there as references to win the neighboring segment, the way a bowling ball knocks over the pins in sequence. Moore built the idea on studies of how high-tech products cross from early adopters to mainstream buyers.
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