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Comment by kadabra9 | Hacker News Reader

Just from an addressable market standpoint, it seems like you have work cut out for you given that you’ve essentially isolated your product to 13-14% or so of the US population. Not to mention those in that segment that already sub to Netflix , other streaming services etc.

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We certainly don't think this will be easy. That said, as you can probably imagine yourself, 13.5% of the U.S. population is a really big TAM on its own. That percentage of Netflix U.S. revenues would make us a very big company. That said, there is competition, and Netflix has black content too. So we will have to differentiate ourselves. As I mentioned in the post, product is one way to do that, and "super-serving" one audience can be a differentiator to when it comes to content, branding, and community. So yeah, we have our work cut out for us, but we're up for it!

I don't disagree. Can certainly build a great business capturing part of that 13.5% with great, focused content. The challenge, similar to Netflix's big challenge is discovering and securing the right content. Good Luck.

Not everything has to scale to Netflix levels to succeed or be sustainable. Targeting a smaller market means you also won't face Netflix' bandwidth costs.

Especially since Netflix has a lot of entertainment featuring black actors, producers etc. from the US. And a lot of Nigerian and South African productions too.

You just have to look for it.

I can't understand why so many commenters here consider this launch to be divisive, or as you say "isolated"...

They're focusing on a particular cultural group to aggregate content and sponsor more... none of which excludes anyone else. Marketing niches are a core concept across the entire business world.

What makes this one niche less effective?

I never said it was divisive. All I said was from a practical standpoint the vast majority of their TAM is capped at capturing part of the 13.5% of the population.

Can they build a good business doing that? If they can discover and secure great content, then I think so.

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