The unwritten law that everyone knows but no one likes to talk about is that businesses, like politicians, don’t really care about you.

It’s a fundamental truth.

Businesses don’t care about you, entrepreneurs don’t care about you and at the end of the day, if we could abstract you down to the size of your wallet and your pertinent buying patterns we would — gladly.

Let me back up a second.

What I just wrote there is not necessarily true. The owner of your local deli and the family that runs the book shop down the street probably do care about you. To them, you have a name and a face and without you, they couldn’t do the thing that they love. What I just wrote there is not necessarily true, but it’s becoming moreso by the day.

Why is this? It’s a natural consequence of entrepreneurs trying to have their cake and eat it too.

When you boil it down, there are two types of businesses in this great, big world — businesses that require scale and businesses that must remained niche.

Businesses that require scale usually benefit from large marketing budgets, low cost of production, and robust channels of distribution; that is to say, if you want to sell double cheeseburgers it is pretty easy to do if you’re McDonalds because you can make a lot of them for very little money and get them out to people without batting an eye. For businesses like this, the individual is meaningless by necessity, the volume required to maintain revenue is so high that if they worried about individual customers and their gripes, they would never be able to sustain growth. Instead, they worry about demographics, the catch-all phrase for the stereotypes we apply to large groups of people to make them easier to understand and market too.

This is great, if you like double cheeseburgers.

On the other side of the spectrum are specialty boutiques, businesses that rely on their niche in order to maintain relevance. These businesses use things like quality customer service, high price and focused marketing campaigns to target individuals. They usually have high costs of production (because they produce lower volumes) but much higher margins (because their products cost a lot more). If you sell Yachts, for example, you better care about every person who walks in that door or you’re going to be out on the street pretty quickly. These companies care about demographics, but in the ideal case, their marketing is so focused that by the time they see a customer they can be pretty certain that it’s the right one.

The problem with Internet entrepreneurs is that many of us want to market like McDonalds while selling Yachts. We cast our nets wide, burning resources on anything and everything that will increase our “numbers” without taking into consideration who those people are and why they would be interested in our product. We take our cues from venture-backed startups, beleiving that eyeballs are the answer and that the more “viral” our growth, the more likely it is we will be able to reap the riches hidden among the bits and bytes.

Most of us, however, don’t have millions of dollars to spend becoming generalists, we also don’t have the staffs required to maintain that kind of market position. Factories need infrastructure and many small entrepreneurs simply don’t have enough of it.

We are much closer to the owner of the local deli than many of us would like to admit. It’s about time we started getting used to that fact.

Just because the Internet makes it easy for you to reach millions of people with the bat of an eye, doesn’t mean that you should do it.

Just because you have a hundred thousand people a month showing up to your site because you broke your bank gaming your way to the top of Google, doesn’t mean that they are buying anything.

The truth is that it is often easier and more cost effective to sell to 20% of a 1000 people than it is to sell to 1% of 20000. You need smaller staffs, less overhead and it gives you the freedom to focus on the individual rather than spending all your time staring at arbitrary site statistics that you were never trained to interpret correctly.

Remember the more personalized the marketing, the higher the conversion rate. The less noise in the sales channel, the more likely people are to buy. The more you can focus on the needs of a single person, the larger the percentage of those people who will stick around and tell their friends.

So ask yourself are you selling Yachts or are you selling cheeseburgers, it might be the most important question you ask today.

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