Why the Most Demanding Customers Drive Billion-Dollar Success
If there is anybody that you want to appeal to it is the 1% consumer.
When you sell to the 1% consumers the rest of the consumers will follow and that is how lots of the most successful brands are scaling today.
You want to reach lots of people, but broad approaches to branding and advertising are not going to get your product purchased. It’s not even just about getting sales.
At the deepest core, the reason you want to reach the 1 % consumer is because you are fulfilling the desires of people who want something the most, which is a means to driving sales.
We live in the age of information where we can research and learn things faster each and every day. So many people have granularly detailed wants and needs that are unfulfilled. These people crave for this desire to be fulfilled. When you nail it for the 1% consumer, you've actually created something that tons of other people want too. They just didn't realize it yet. The most attentive consumers are always ahead of the curve and they identify problems or areas of improvement with products years before the mainstream catches on. Because of the times we live in, the delighted 1% consumers are monetizing their product experiences by leveraging the creation of review content on social media platforms. They are curious and they are trying out new things all the time. If you have a product that is genuinely great, then you will have people making Tik Tok and youtube videos about it, as well as having people asking questions and sharing experiences about it on platforms like Reddit and X. In today's market place, delighted customers spread their joy and they especially do so when they can be rewarded, which is why Tik Tok Shop Affiliate marketing has grown in popularity so much.
Real-World Examples of 1% Consumer Success
There are many successful brands in the health/wellness and health food sectors of the marketplace in the United States. Today, most of these brands are earning their success because they are prime examples of appealing to the 1% consumers.
People who possess a strong interest for healthy food are always researching the ingredients and they are super picky about what they want. They take this approach to their health because they want to live long and happy lives where they can be the best version of themselves. This leads to them giving a close look at the ingredients label on all of the food and supplement products they buy. This is why new brands are able to enter the market place, dominate the competition, and then get acquired for billions.
In the food and beverage sectors of the marketplace the trend is very clear. The trend is that the brands with healthy ingredients are the ones that are growing the most. They grow the most because the founders of these brands identified the wants and needs of picky consumers. An example of this is Siete potato chips. They literally just decided to make healthy chips without seed oils. They surged in popularity and as a result they got way more sales. In January of 2025, Pepsi acquired them for $1.2 billion dollars. Think about it. For years, people have been complaining about seed oils on social media because there has been a growing consensus that they are terrible for people's health. They simply listened to picky people. They made over a billion dollars because those picky people saw a new brand in the chip aisle, checked the ingredients, and saw no seed oils, and decided to buy. They are not the only ones. Another brand that has been exemplary in appealing to the 1% consumers is Poppi. Poppi was started by a woman who started making her own soda at home because she didn't like how unhealthy most of the mainstream sodas were. She crafted an answer to her problem and started selling it at a farmers market. It got so popular that she got invited on to Shark Tank and her soda got put on the shelves at Whole Foods. Fast forward, and Poppi was acquired by Pepsi Co in May of 2025 for $1.95 billion dollars. (I know Poppi is not the healthiest when hyper analyzing its ingredients, but it is a step in the right direction and an overall net positive for soda drinkers.) The newest brand that is becoming an example of satisfying the 1% consumer is a brand named Protein Pints. Protein Pints is a protein ice cream company that has entirely natural ingredients with low sugar content. As someone who is a frequent customer of Protein Pints, I am buying a protein ice cream because I want to eat healthy. Before Protein Pints came out, there were only about 2 or 3 ice cream brands available in popular grocery store freezers that have high protein and low sugar content, and none of those brands had pure ingredients. Protein Pints has solved this problem and has satisfied the 1% consumers who care about this. As a result, they are having hyperbolic growth as a company and I would bet that they will have an opportunity to get acquired for a large sum of money in the future.
(Side Note: If you get to a point of scale with your business where you get the opportunity to go through an acquisition, make sure you get the investors to agree to not change things up too much. Unfortunately, there have been multiple examples of brand reputations being tarnished after getting acquired because too many things were changed in their products. The 1% consumers will find out and boycott you. You’d be shocked at how many venture capitalists and private equity folks don't understand consumers and think cutting costs through decreasing quality is the best way to get more profits.)
Building for the Few to Capture the Many
Understanding consumers is something that most businesses still get wrong, and it’s why so many brands stay stuck while a few explode into billion-dollar exits. When you create a product that completely blows away the 1% consumer, you aren’t building something “niche” that you’ll later have to broaden or water down. You are actually putting one of the single best versions of that product into the market from the very beginning. The 1% consumer is just the first group to discover it. They are the ones who are super detailed in how they analyze the quality of a product and the experience they have with it. They are doing things like looking at every single ingredient, comparing it to similar products from competitors, looking for unique features, or whatever specific thing drives them crazy. When they finally pick up your product and realize someone actually fixed every pain point they’ve ever had, they don’t stay quiet. They post review videos on social media. They write long Reddit reviews. They tell all their friends. They become walking, talking proof that your product is legitimately superior. That proof helps do the selling for you. The casual consumer, the person who doesn’t spend twenty minutes in the aisle comparing labels, sees the wave of real excitement, grabs your product on impulse, tries it once, and immediately gets why everyone is obsessed. They don’t need to become granularly detailed product knowledge experts themselves. They just need to experience how good it is. And once they do, they keep buying. So if you’re building something right now, don’t ask how to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Ask how to create the product that the most demanding, most obsessive 1% consumers will fall in love with instantly. Get it right for them—at real volume—and the rest of the market will follow faster than you ever imagined. That’s the entire game in today’s world, and it’s only getting more powerful.
