In between personal sales (salespeople obviously required) and traditional advertising (no salespeople required) there is a dead zone.
Suppose we create a software service that helps convenience store owners track their inventory and manage ordering. For a product priced around $1,000, there might be no good distribution channel to reach the small businesses that might buy it.
Even if we have a clear value proposition, how do we get people to hear it? Advertising would either be too broad (there's no TV channel that only convenience store owners watch) or too inefficient (on its own, an ad in Convenience Store News probably won't convince any owner to part with $1,000 a year).
The product needs a personal sales effort, but at that price point, we simply don't have the resources to send an actual person to talk to every prospective customer. This is why so many small and medium-sized businesses don't use tools that bigger firms take for granted. It's not that small business proprietors are unusually backward or that good tools don't exist:
Companies must strive for 10x better because merely incremental improvements often end up meaning no improvement at all for the end user.
Only when our product is 10x better can we offer the customer transparent superiority.
Our goal, after enough of these customer conversations, is to be able to stand up in front of our company and say, "Here were our hypotheses about our customers, their problems, and how they worked. Now here's what they are saying their issues really are, and this is how they really spend their day."
We've said that our goal is to understand the customer in depth. What do we mean by "in depth?" We don't mean we know their jobs as well as they do. How could we? We mean being so thoroughly conversant with what truly matters to them that we can discuss their issues convincingly.
Doing something different is what's truly good for society-and it's also what allow a business to profit by monopolizing a new market. The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.
An entrepreneur can't benefit from macro-scale insight unless his own plans begin at the micro-scale.