SOP 194 — Count what it costs to become known

1. Too few people know about you

Saying that not enough people know about your stuff is easy. The hard part is to truly absorb the sheer size of the market, and how slight and fleeting every attempt at being known is beside it.

The point is aimed at a belief heard so many times: I think my market is saturated; I do not think anyone is left who could find out. The answer offered to anyone who says it is that they are just so wrong, and the examples below are offered to knock the belief down.

2. Evidence from back-to-back launches

The earlier launch. In one example, after an owner's launch, people still came up to that owner on the street and were asked whether they had come to the launch. 19 out of 20 had not even known about the thing being launched. The advertising behind that launch had been relentless. No one knew.

The launch after it. This time the share was higher, and the rise was called slight: probably about one in four had heard that a launch was coming, and three out of four still had not. That was after spending a great deal of money on it. And these were people who already knew who the owner was; they still did not know a launch was on its way.

3. The release that went live early

For the same owner, a month ahead of a launch, someone on the team was getting everything ready on the online store the product would sell through. That store needs the product uploaded ahead of time, and it was set up as live by accident, without anyone realizing. For 24 hours the product, which had been kept secret while the launch was prepared, was on sale. 72 people bought it in about 60 minutes. With a month or more still to go, the reaction was that the launch was ruined.

Nothing happened.

What gave peace at night was the realization that somebody would have had to take the product and begin promoting it, would have had to start advertising it, because the one out shouting from the rooftops that it was coming was the person launching it. Those 72 strangers did buy it ahead of time. One of them commented on a post, asking how they somehow already had it. Nobody responded.

The lesson drawn. No one knows you exist. No one knows your business exists, or what you are up to. Everyone is obsessed with their own lives. Becoming known takes so much effort that it is typically underestimated, and wildly. Building the brand that owner has now was known at the start to be a lot of work, and that still pales against how much work it has actually been.

4. What it costs to become famous

To think at the larger scale, one estimate works backward to about what it costs to become kind of A-list famous, from a case: an actress who was not very well known before a film series that was largely about her. The advertising for the film cost about 50 million dollars. That figure was taken as almost a placeholder: she went from almost obscure to famous on 50 million dollars of advertising budget, and that budget is roughly 5 billion impressions.

So, how much does it really cost to make you, or your business, famous? About 50 million dollars, or 5 billion impressions. You can either put in the effort or put in the money, and you get there either way. That is the amount of money, or of effort, it takes.

At a smaller budget. Once that was clear, the next thought was that spending $500,000 a year would take 100 years to reach that level of acclaim. The issue is that the spending would be concentrated; the examples offered are a local marketplace, or advertising repeated to the same customers.

Scale it to your pond. You can still cut the target down. Narrow it from being famous globally, or nationally, to being famous within your own pond, and scale the math down to your market. The 50 million dollars is used as a hypothetical extreme, then reversed. In that estimate, the primary market is probably the United States; or, on a wider reading, the English-speaking world is probably the primary market. That was the math actually done in that case.

This page gives no figure for what becoming known costs in a smaller market.

5. Growth is held back by irrelevance

Unless you have a viral product, or some sort of zero-cost software where adding one more person costs nothing, all growth is held back by irrelevance.

Were your business known to every single person in the world, it would be bigger than it is today.
Were it known to every single person in the world, the talent you need to grow it would be yours.

So, fundamentally, whether you are constrained on supply or on demand, what caps your growth is that, in the scheme of the larger universe, you are irrelevant.

The reminder here: the problem can probably be solved with more outreach to more people, more things made for the people you want to serve, and more advertising.

6. Effort sized to the goal

The roofing owner. The owner of a roofing company needed, reportedly, another 40 sales reps to reach his goals, and it seemed the hiring would take a year or so. After more talk, he was asked whether he had kids. He said yes. Then: picture your kids getting abducted when this month ends unless you have those 40 sales reps. What would you do? What would it take? Because you can do that.

A hiring push. One founder, starting a new venture, flew every single person to a warehouse to build out the first level of the team, and hired 300 people in seven days. They ran about 2,000 interviews with a group of 15 people. In the case offered, it served one owner as a reminder of how much more that owner still needed to do to reach the goal: the effort in it was called violent.

The view here is that these shifts in perspective matter more than the tactics.

7. The two truths

Two truths are offered for why you are not getting as many leads as you want:

People do not know you exist.
You have not given the very, very few who do know you a good enough reason to engage.

That, fundamentally, is it: either you have not reached people, or if you have, the reason you gave them fell short.

8. What this page does not decide for you

How big the rise between the launches was. One in 20 to about one in four is five times the share, and the rise was called slight. This page does not settle which reading is right.
What the concentration means for the 100 years. Not established on this page.

9. The checklist

Step	What to do
Before calling the market saturated	Weigh how large the market is against how few people know you
Size the extreme	To become famous: about 50 million dollars, roughly 5 billion impressions; at $500,000 a year, 100 years
Scale it down	Narrow from global or national fame to your own pond, and scale the math down to your market
Check the exception	Unless the product is viral or adds a person at no cost, irrelevance constrains growth, supply or demand side
The reminder offered	The problem can probably be solved by reaching out to more people, making more for the people you serve, and advertising more
Size the effort	The question from the roofing owner's case: with stakes that high, what would you do, and what would it take?
Diagnose the shortfall	Do people know you exist? Have the few who do been given a good enough reason to engage?

10. Where this sits

The market read as a pie already cut into slices, and the point at which saturation can be real: SOP 40 — Choose the next growth move, section 4.
Advertising as letting people know about your stuff, set apart from branding: see SOP 92 — Measure brand as reach, influence and direction, section 2.
A test run at too small a volume, and the volume it took instead, is the flyer case on SOP 52, section 2.
The ladder a business climbs as its advertising grows is laid out on SOP 54.

11. What this page does not cover

The channels for reaching more people and the offers that give them a reason to engage are not covered on this page.