Think small
sahillavingia.com
sahillavingia.com
If you concentrate on "indie bands and their music videos", sure, you'll hit the sweet spot for them. But you might have decided that limiting uploads to 8 minutes made sense because no music video will be longer than that. It makes sense from other standpoints, too, because it's easier to store, stream, and otherwise handle smaller videos.
But what about indie movie producers? Or kids with cats? Or ... Well, the billions of other video producers out there.
A friend of mine was recently upset that YouTube was limiting him to 15 minutes. He wanted to upload gameplay recordings, and splitting them into 15 minute chunks was a real pain.
Notch's Ludum Dare coding videos would also not have been allowed, and they were excellent watching. I had never heard of the video host, and might never hear of them again... Assuming I don't use them. And I might.
So don't blindfold yourself and work on niches. Work on the big picture, but be sure to make sure your product actually does work for some specific tasks.
But the execution can't directly reflect the vision or few will understand how it solves their needs.
It's all about the search for a model that is ubiquitous, right? A lot of small points of value that build into huge influence.
I created Lokenote.com as I saw people posting adverts on lampposts, but I think that was too vague an idea, so maybe my first go at Lokenote was too generic [ pinning a note to the map ].
I did also build it for a guy who delivers packages all day and wants to share notes with other drivers on how to get to teh right entrance at a building or property - so I need to get that guy to use my site and make it useful for his realworld problem.
Reality has this way of being unpredictable... which makes it interesting, right?
Whatever you’re thinking, think bigger.
But there is less opposition than it might seem. It is important to start small, but not stagnate on being small.
[1] http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/24/zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh-on-d...