Les Mckeown preaches that finding a profitable and sustainable market is the most critical task for any founder.
The clearer we understand our target customers or clients, the more efficiently we can market our products and services to them in their preferred language, style, and method.
One person who got this right was not a business owner at all but a poet. That’s right, a poet.
Langston Hughes was an American poet the man known as “The O. Henry of Harlem,” when asked what audience he wrote for, he brilliantly replied, “Workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago — people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter — and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.”
We may have a little more defining to do. What do you think?