It’s ok not to appeal to everyone. In fact, it’s better not to, because to appeal to everyone you have to be watered down, and watered down won’t move people the way you want to. You want to embrace your own unique vision. Your own strangeness. That is your next greatest power.
This is the big counterintuitive piece of startup advice that most new founders don’t get. They think the wider the audience to start the better. But it’s so much easier to build a product if you have a limited focus for what you are building—and most of the time that means building for a limited, focused, group of people. And it’s so much easier to build something people love when you’ve built it just for them.
So, as Paul Graham says, better to have something 10 people love in the beginning, than something 1000 people kind of like.
And when you move forward, don’t judge by your harshest critics, judge by your best target audience.
Resources about this idea:
From the Founder Toolkit, here are examples of founders successfully finding their best target audience: