Someone would miss it

A bookbinder in Damietta repairs old books for people who cannot bear to lose them. A grandmother's recipe notebook held together with tape. A father's school atlas. A shelf of law books that a family wants to keep in one piece.

He has no front on a main road and no sign anyone could read from a passing car. His friends tell him to go broader: print wedding cards, run a photocopier, take whatever walks in. Be for everyone.

I understand the advice. Almost everything around a small business pushes that way: bigger, smoother, more general, ready for whoever happens by. It sounds like ambition.

But choosing a small and particular audience, what Seth Godin calls the smallest viable audience, is not settling for less. It is a step, and usually a step towards better work rather than a smaller version of it. The people who need a book saved do not stumble across him. They go looking, and they travel to find him, because nobody nearby does it with that care.

It is also harder than it sounds. A man who serves anyone can sit and wait for the next stranger to come through the door. A man who serves a few has no such excuse. He has to know exactly who he is for and what he does for them, and then do it so well that they tell the next person holding a damaged book where to go.

The test is simple to state. If he closed tomorrow, would anyone feel the loss? Not the whole town. A few dozen families with something precious on a shelf.

Being missed by someone is a higher bar than being found by everyone, and it is the only one worth clearing.