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Poll: Horizontal or Vertical Market for your Startup

11 points by edw519 ↗ HN
For your startup, are you more interested in a horizontal (one function across many industries like word processing or collaboration) market or a vertical (multi-functional in one niche like medical claims processing, hair salon, or architecture) market?

12 comments

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jacquesm
Can you add b2b and b2c as well as options ?

That is also interesting, no need to do another poll for that.

cousin_it
As far as I understand, b2b/b2c is orthogonal to horizontal/vertical. But HN polls seem to allow voting for multiple alternatives, so b2b/b2c could be added without harm.

(Edit: now I see that's exactly what you were suggesting. Sorry.)

npost
Horizontal. Though, vertical tends to have better short term results.
callmeed
Not only that, but vertical has a better chance of even making it past the short-term. With a vertical, it's much easier to find a pain point that needs to be solved, build it, and focus your marketing efforts.
jacquesm
The results of the poll seem to be bearing that out.

It would have been very surprising to see another outcome.

alansantos
build it horizontally then sell it vertically.
jacquesm
That's an interesting one, Historically the opposite has happened.

Build something for a niche, sell into that niche, then expand outside the niche by adapting the product to other uses once you have sufficient strength to do that.

It takes a lot more in terms of resources to develop for a niche than for a 'horizontal' market, the marketing expenses are also a multiple.

alansantos
My opinion is that building horizontal lets you enter different verticals more quickly (and exit them as well). Or perhaps get your toes wet in many verticals to see what's nice and warm before you jump in.
tcarnell
I'm not sure any of these are a healthy approach to build something 'useful'. I'm sure once you have built a useful product you could later say that it was 'Horizontal' or 'Vertical' etc, but to build a product strategy based on these concepts is to 'rule out' a potential market before you've even started...
icey
You've got to have some kind of strategy to begin with though, don't you? I'd assume you would have an idea of who you were targeting with your application, even if that target audience changes.
tcarnell
...so having built my own web application, I've realised that yes, it's probably best to build 'horizontally' and sell 'vertically' !!!