Should an early-stage startup launch with a narrow, focused niche or target a broad market across multiple categories?

2026-05-29 · Lounge · Video answer (transcript)

Hey, you're getting the video response this time. So the first thing is: absolutely. You've got to focus.

I learned it the hard way. Early on at Netflix, we were going to be a portal. We were going to be everything to everybody, and it was a complete disaster. We got distracted and spread ourselves way too thin.

The thing is, most founders get this backwards. They think testing broadly tests demand. But it just means you do ten things poorly instead of one thing really well, and no one really cares if you have 10 people in 40 categories. What you want is 40,000 people in one category.

If you launch broadly, you'll spend all your time managing empty categories. So absolutely pick one. Pick the one that's the most resonant—the one where they will overlook all the problems with your site because they want to get it right—and nail that one. And if you do it cleverly, you can pick ones which then have obvious expansions into adjoining categories.

So, there's my quick take. Focus, focus, focus. I have zero hesitancy to make that a recommendation. Good luck.

Public Hand Raises only. Questions anonymized; answers are Marc Randolph's mentorship responses with names redacted.