Find the smallest viable audience

Godin's central strategic move is to stop asking how to reach everyone and start asking who, specifically, would be genuinely disappointed if your product vanished tomorrow. That group — often surprisingly small — is the smallest viable audience: enough people to sustain the work, no more.

Targeting everyone produces a message diluted enough to move no one; targeting a small, specific group lets you build something sharp enough to matter intensely to them, which is also what makes it spreadable, because a message built for someone specific travels through their networks far better than a generic one built for no one in particular.

He treats this smallness as a feature, not a limitation to apologize for — a business built to serve a devoted minority extremely well tends to outlast one chasing a broad, indifferent majority. Takeaway: don't ask how big your audience could be; ask how small it needs to be to still work.