The Target Market

The landing page for Square Space says in part: 

A website makes it real. Join millions of entrepreneurs who run their business on Squarespace.

14M+ Entrepreneurs Served

$36B+ Earned by Entrepreneurs

A lot of people are impressed with numbers like that. I'm mathier than average and there's just three zeros difference between millions and billions, so 36 billion dollars divided by 14 million entrepreneurs is $2,571.4286 apiece or on average.

Most likely it's not evenly distributed and there's a lot of people making nothing or very little and a relatively small number making enough money to live on. 

I'm not trying to slam them. They allow you to sign up for FREE and they are trying to serve small businesses who can't really afford their own IT department in house.

An awful lot of online businesses make most of their money from a small percentage of people using the service. Online games often make a pittance from most users and then a few wealthy people spend significant money on the game and that pays the team for their work and that model makes games available for free to people like me.

A website doesn't really make it a real business. I wrote about this elsewhere and started the piece with the song line Illusion never changed into something real. 

That's a site called Memome Project and I write there about things like how do you go from conceiving of a business idea to birthing a real business? Because spitballing about "I would like to do X!" happens all the time without it leading to real world results.

I just happen to have Square Space open because I'm trying to figure out how to research THIS business idea and figure out what my prospective target market might be, what existing products are trying to serve this space and what might be a reasonable amount to charge that people might actually pay me and that also would make sense for ME as adequate compensation.

I don't really know where to go looking for that information, in part because the definition of small business varies by country and can vary by industry. Some countries say fewer than 50 employees, but in the US where I live, a small business may have up to 500 employees.

I've researched this stuff on and off a lot of years and the kinds of businesses I'm probably likely to appeal to would be defined as micro enterprises. I'm probably looking at serving businesses with no more than ten employees and in many cases are solopreneurs.

If it's an established business with dozens or hundreds of employees, it probably already has a website and if it's looking for web services, it's not looking for a budget-friendly landing page or basic website. A more established business will likely be in the market for something like a service that will process online orders.

Square Space, Wix and similar are the kinds of businesses currently serving very small establishments that may be small in part because they are new. 

Some websites will use the phrase startup for any new business, but in the venture capital world, that's typically reserved for a business that has some hope of growing large fairly quickly and therefore is worthwhile for venture capital firms to invest in.

I'm probably not really what a startup of the venture capital type is looking for. They frequently have one or more programmers on their team of founders and that's a game where you go big or go home.

In 2017, I applied for a job doing community development work and I didn't get hired. I kind of didn't really want the job and I hoped the guy they did hire would actually do his job and help me succeed as a local trying to establish a local small business.

The short version of a long story is:

1. Venture capital firms are typically founded by successful entrepreneurs and they are looking to invest money in business models with sufficient growth potential to make it profitable for them to front them some capital and provide stewardship or guidance to help them succeed.

2. Micro enterprises and new business in small towns get nominally championed by organizations that are typically organized as nonprofits by people who have no experience running a small business and these organizations are probably essentially con jobs if they are associated with the Main Street America program. Even if they aren't con jobs, they may mean well but they know how to run a nonprofit, not a for profit business.

3. The Small Business Administration is a government program and may have value for entrepreneurs, but probably most of the people working there have firsthand experience as employees dealing with big government bureaucracies and don't really know how to help micro enterprises succeed.

Community development work and urban planning literature is dominated by information useful to big cities. If you are any good at it, you can probably get a job in a big city with the same title that pays more money.

There's no money in helping micro enterprises succeed. So most micro enterprises are largely on their own.

I'm frankly probably wasting my time trying to figure out how to effectively serve this space and DIYing it via services like Square Space and Wix is likely to remain the industry standard. (I'm absolutely not looking to compete with Square Space or Wix. Those are platforms and I'm thinking of essentially being a consultant who helps you make a good website on such a service.)

I tried this once before in a very small town where I had recently moved and I didn't really succeed. I had a small number of paying clients while local "good ol' boys" promoted their buddy who didn't have the login credentials for the websites I was taking over from him and who had trouble repointing a URL, but was somehow able to get big bucks from locals for his work and I had no hope of convincing people "You are paying too much. He's not that good."

Square Space is trying to appeal to people not yet really making money, but hoping to. They don't charge you anything upfront. They are telling you a website makes it real and you can start for free because they are trying to get people with dreams to start acting on it and do something with it at all.

This is a target market of people who probably aren't taking out SBA loans and if they are, they aren't adequately cognizant that they are burning runway and need to act sooner rather than later. And unlike venture capital startups, this category of new businesses doesn't have an experienced, successful business person with money on the line meeting with them regularly and politely busting their chops to get it done.

In my experience, this is a space where people dither and trend towards barely eeking out a living. And it's extremely challenging to explain to them what actually matters for business success and no one wants to deal with them and their neurotic behavior because venture capitalists only deal with this if there's enough potential for profit to repeat themselves a zillion times while they get treated like they are being jerks for trying to tell you what you are doing wrong and how to fix it.

And I see no means to establish credibility. People like reading those big, impressive figures on the Square Space landing page and seeing Square Space as SUCCESSFUL because $BILLION$!