Ignore the first 53,651 users

I saw this interesting post linked off of techmeme today:

Redeye VC: 53,651

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been on several phone pitches from west-coast companies that are looking to be the “flickr of XXXX” or “like del.icio.us but YYYY” or “the Digg killer”. It got me thinking – how many people outside of the valley have ever heard of these companies? I asked a bunch of local (Philly-area) acquaintances and the answer came back loud and clear: none – nada - zip. People here have barely heard of Myspace and Craigslist – let alone any of the “hot” Web 2.0 companies.

As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience.

It’s an interesting observation - but I’m wondering if its more of a age segmentation than a geographic segmentation. Heck, my sister’s heard of myspace and she’s hardly tech saavy. In fact, it seems to me a lot of people outside of the Valley have heard of MySpace (not as much for flickr.)

In the end though, wasn’t Google just for geeks? Wasn’t the iPod just for geeks? Heck, it was only for Mac geeks at that since the first iPods were only Mac compatible for a while.

Besides time and a super compelling user experience, what else does it take to make a product successful in the mainstream?