One thing I learned during a 6 month class of entrepreneurship, is that a company and product have …

Wouldn't a more narrow specific audience you need to target and market be more expensive than a broad campaign? If you use a broad campaign that's targeting more people overall due to a larger pool of potential users...you should see more customers. And a more generic less targeted ad should be cheaper per click or whatever KPI.

This is one of those things that really mystifies me. We always hear about startups, killer apps, etc. that generally target a fat margin, even the cloud providers with economies of scale are doing everything they can to avoid becoming a "dumb pipe", but at the same time in the background there are a bunch of companies which somehow make e.g. manufacturing matchsticks profitable. What is their secret?

> That means it's utterly impossible to make a product for lower income people unless it's really really good. The flip side is that products targeted at poor people are actually amazing. Something like a cheap grocery chain involves logistic and technological capabilities that were unachievable through most of human history. And the price points society hits for things that are effectively magical are absurdly low. The default expectation for someone who can lift heavy objects or maybe do some cleaning would be that they can scrape together just enough food to survive. But the modern economy is so optimised at the low end that most people can actually achieve a pretty reasonable standard of living on very questionable levels of productivity, skill and ability. Although not luxurious by modern standards, obviously.

That's also a much more crowded market and your rivals are probably more ready to outspend you. For instance if you're selling vitamins, are your odds of succeeding in the luxury market that much higher ?

Sadly true. Looking at it from the other end: - Wealthy people have plenty of extra money. Their biggest worry is finding new shiny trendy luxuries and bling, to show that wealth off. It's relatively easy for entrepreneurs to dream up and make such stuff. - Poor people don't have extra money. Their biggest worry is having enough to afford food, clothing, housing, transportation, and medical care. It's extremely hard for entrepreneurs to out-compete existing providers of those (to the poor).

>That means it's utterly impossible to make a product for lower income people unless it's really really good. Rather really really cheap. There is definitely a demand for servicing lower income people. It's just not a great place to be for people with middle class sensitivities.

> really really good Not really the way I’d put it: it has to be really, really cheap or really, really indispensable (why is a smartphone a must have for a homeless person…?)

> you just have to increase quality Today’s day and age you don’t even have to increase quality. You simply repackage stuff in a new social media friendly way. I mean, just look at the success of Goop and the general “wellness” industry which keeps criticizing Big Pharma (which deserve a lot of legitimate criticism that need to be solved with better, not necessarily more, regulation) when all the criticisms apply to wellness with the added concern that they’re completely unregulated and have no testing requirements.