Painter or canvas - your opportunity in mass niche
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Created 232 days ago, Updated 176 days ago
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Mass niche will provide two types of business opportunities. One is to become a painter and the other a canvas.
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Becoming a Painter means creating cartoons and video clips, merchandising and designing clothes, tuning cars, cellular phones and shoes, or remodeling interior design for offices and homes. In mass niche ecosystem, they provide the final products for the final users. For them, current final products tend to become materials to tune.
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The source of added value by mass niche painters lies in creativity. In the past, the foundation of competitive advantage came mainly from some variation of entry barriers; monopoly of raw materials, patents, regulatory protection, etc. However, those hard weapons are not for the mass niche painters. It is creativity to make (or to identify) differentiated clothing, cartoons, video clips, cars, cellular phones and interior that enables mass niche painters to exist in the market.
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In a ‘painter’ business, what you sell will reflect yourself very strongly. If you draw a cartoon, it will show what you think is funny, what you think is sad, etc. When you sell clothes, they will be the ones you would like to wear. When customers buy your products, they are also buying a part of you: your taste, your emotion, your style, your sense of humor, and your story.
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For this reason, it would be difficult for major corporations to become Painters. Strong character and nicheness is basis of mass niche painter, and it conflicts with becoming a large business. To become large, you should be liked by a lot of people, and that means you should target an average taste. But I am expecting that demand will be increasingly fragmented, that is, finding an average will be difficult. If you still want to find a large opportunity, you should rather try to be a canvas which will be discussed shortly. If you want to be a painter, you should understand that you are not likely to become the next Google.
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The painter has a very different goal from a traditional company. The goal of large corporations is to have 1,000 people working on one hit product to make $50,000 per person, whereas the goal of a mass niche painter is to have 1 person working on one product to make $100,000. A revenue of $100,000 from a self-produced movie would be a dream for a mass niche movie maker, but it would be a disaster for a traditinoal mainstream movie project. The mass niche will bring a lot more of this new kind of success, which could be called success 2.0. You do what you love, free from bureaucracy, and earn higher income than when you worked for a big company. That’s your goal.
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Another business opportunity in mass niche is to provide tools for the mass niche painters. PandoraTV in video, Naver’s Toon and Comic Artist Challenge in cartoon, Gmarket in clothng, tuning parts in car tuning, and plain sneakers play such roles.
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A Canvas makes it possible for Painters to produce something that could have been done only by people and companies with special skills or a lot of money. Probably the best known example of canvas would be blogging platforms like Naver blog and (though probably better called as mini homepage) Cyworld. When Internet first came out, only large companies had websites, because for general public it was too difficult to make a website as they had to learn HTML and host a server, etc. Some companies introduced website editing softwares, but it was not easy enough yet. But when the blog came out, people rushed to it. Why? It was easy. Just subscribe online, and you have a blog.
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Second condition for a canvas is that it should leave a room for creativity of the painter. Let me ask you a question. Is franchise restaurant a good canvas? It does make it easy for franchisees who don’t have restaurant business experiences to start a restaurant. But it does not leave much room for creativity. You should follow the same menu, recipe, logo, pricing, and interior design. I am not saying it is a bad business model. It is a good model, which is providing a second career for many people in Korea. The point is that it is not a mass niche canvas. If there are 100 painters, a canvas should have a room for 100 different paintings.
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A canvas is more likely to become a large business than a painter is. There are much more bloggers than there are blogging tools. There are much more online boutiques than there are online marketplaces and ecommerce platforms.
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From this perspective, is the traditional newspaper a painter or a canvas? According to our definition, they are a painter. For the future, they have a choice of remaining as a painter, or to become a canvas. I was actually asked this question by a newspaper executive. It is a very difficult issue. They are too large as a mass niche painter. I wonder how they could maintain unique style. But then can they become a canvas? Something like OhmyNews, or Digg? I don’t know. This is not only about newspapers. Most incumbent companies tradtionally have been painters who used their canvas for themselves only. Now, they should think about whether to be a painter or a canvas.
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