Sriracha's David Tran makes $60M a year — he started selling to a small group

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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️

David Tran was an officer in the South Vietnamese army, and he cooked for the soldiers.

On the side, he and his family made chili sauce, the way his family had always made it.

Then the war ended, and the side he had fought for lost.

Men who had served in that army were being locked up in prison camps.

Hundreds of thousands of people got out of the country any way they could, and David was one of them.

In December 1978 he got his family onto a cargo ship called the Huey Fong.

A cargo ship is built to carry crates.
That one was carrying three thousand three hundred and eighteen people.

He reached Boston in the spring of 1979, and moved to Los Angeles soon after.

He was thirty-four, in a country he did not know, and the one thing he knew how to make was chili sauce.

So he started making it again, by hand, in a bucket.

In February 1980 he registered a company and named it after the ship that got him out.
The ship was the Huey Fong, and he called the company Huy Fong Foods.

He put a rooster on the label, because he was born in a Chinese zodiac year named after the rooster.

Then he loaded the buckets into a blue Chevy van and drove around Los Angeles selling the sauce out of the back.

He did not walk into supermarkets.

He went to Asian restaurants and Asian markets, first in Los Angeles, then as far as San Diego and San Francisco.

Those cooks knew this sauce already.
They had grown up eating it, and they could not buy it in America.

He made two thousand three hundred dollars in his first month.

And that was the entire business.

He was not trying to sell to everyone in America.
He was not even trying to sell to everyone who likes spicy food.

He was selling to Vietnamese and other Asian cooks in one part of California, who wanted the sauce they remembered from home.

He never bought a single advertisement.
Not then, and not once since.

For nearly thirty years, almost nobody outside those kitchens had heard of him.

Then the cooks' customers started asking what was in the food.
Then chefs in other restaurants started ordering it.
Then supermarkets came asking him.

Get this — by 2012 Huy Fong Foods was selling about sixty million dollars of sauce a year.

It was growing about twenty percent every year, and that bottle with the rooster on it became the third best-selling hot sauce in America.

And through all of it, he never changed the recipe.

He never made it milder for Americans who couldn't take the heat.
The sauce that ended up in supermarkets is the sauce he made in a bucket for Vietnamese cooks.

David made a sauce for one small group of cooks, and then the rest of America started buying it.

But right now, we write our newsletter for everyone who might possibly be interested, because a bigger audience sounds like a bigger business.

So every issue is a little general, and a little safe, so it can suit everybody.

Nobody hates it, but nobody needs it either, and when we skip a week, not one reader writes to ask why.

David did the opposite, he made the hottest sauce he could for Vietnamese cooks, and let everyone else find it later.

There is one question that tells you how small your group of readers should be.

The answer is usually a much smaller group than feels safe.

A meditation teacher answered it and built the biggest meditation community anywhere, so meet Susan.

Susan Piver teaches meditation.

She had already written a New York Times bestseller called The Hard Questions.

That book was not about meditation at all.
It was a list of a hundred questions couples should ask each other before they get married.

So she had readers, and her meditation classes were full.

She also ran retreats, where people come and practice together for a few days.

Those few days change people.
You sit in a room with other people doing the same thing, and something clicks.

Then the retreat ends, everybody goes home, and the same question keeps coming back to Susan from her students.

"How do we find a local teacher we can connect with to continue our practice?"

Most of them lived nowhere near her, and nowhere near any teacher at all.

So they would sit alone for a week, then skip a day, then skip a month, and the whole thing quietly died.

Susan could see it happening after every retreat.

So she decided to be the teacher they couldn't find.

Not in person, because they were spread all over the country.
Online, where distance didn't matter.

In 2012 she started an online meditation community and called it the Open Heart Project.

She did not build it for everyone in the world who might like meditation.

She built it for the people who had already sat in her retreats and wanted to keep going.

That is a few thousand people, not millions of people.

She sent them video lessons for free, and the ones who wanted more could pay to practice with her almost every day.

Get this — the Open Heart Project now has more than twenty thousand members.

In This Is Marketing, Seth Godin calls it the largest meditation community in the world, run by one person working on it full time.

Turns out the way to build the biggest meditation group anywhere was to build it for the smallest group she could name.

➡️ The Smallest Viable Market

David made his sauce for Asian cooks in one part of California and never bought an ad.
He ended up with the third best-selling hot sauce in America.

Susan built her group for the people who had already sat in her retreats, and ended up with the biggest meditation community anywhere.

Seth's approach is called the Smallest Viable Market.

Seth Godin, who sold his company Yoyodyne to Yahoo in 1998 for $29.6 million, wrote the rule down as one question.
How few people could find this indispensable and still make it worth doing?

Indispensable is the test.
Not people who would enjoy your newsletter, but people who would email you if it stopped arriving.

Neither David nor Susan went looking for strangers.
They both wrote for people they already knew: cooks from the country he left, the people who had been in her room.

So you stop writing for anyone who might read your newsletter, and write for the few who would miss it.

Those few are the ones who tell everybody else, because nobody forwards a newsletter they merely liked.

Make it for one group of cooks.

That's it, my fellow renegades!

Yours 'helping you borrow the shortcuts from people who already made it' Vijay Peduru 🦸‍♂️

The prompt below shrinks who you are writing for until the work becomes indispensable to somebody.