Short transcript excerpt arguing that event organisers and B2B community builders should prioritise small, intimate, well-served groups over mass scale. The speaker contrasts investor-driven obsession with scale and monopoly with a belief that higher value can be captured from smaller segments by creating exchanges people will pay for. Advice targets organisers with large audience lists, recommending breaking them into many small, monetisable groups.
Chapters
I've thought about this a lot, as you can imagine, and I've. I've had 23 years to think about it. And if you look at economics of investors, if you look at the way Peter Thiel funded Facebook and the investors went into Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter, the obsession was with scale and monopoly. Scale from free and monopoly, from unlimited capital to get to a billion users or 2 billion users. Everything was about scale. For that IPO, for that shareholder hit big, big, big, big, big. But I actually believe you can make more money from fewer people in small, intimate groups if you serve them properly. So I think you can make more money from 100 people than a thousand people. I think you can make more money from 100 people than 10,000 people, provided you give them the value that they want. And I think whether your clients have 5,000 conference members or 100,000 conference members, they've got to break those, organ up those lists or communities or audiences down into lots and lots of small groups, lots and lots of small ingredients, and give more at a higher price for more value, rather than having a big list that the sponsor comes in and says, can I tap into your hundred thousand? Can I tap into your five thousand? Because you can't get the right people, you can't identify the right people until you create some kind of exchange for them to invest in, some kind of value for them to invest in. And they won't invest in big. They will invest in small.
