The 1% Solution

Have you ever heard any variation of this line from someone talking about their favorite stock?

"If we can just capture 1% of the market, why, that's millions and millions of dollars! We'll be rich!!"

Where "the market" is something ludicrously huge for a tiny company to be taking on, like the number of households in the United States, or, in REFR's case, the worldwide market for glass, which runs around 20 billion square feet per year.

It's an easy trick for the uninitiated to fall for, as the promoter makes some huge undertaking seem trivial by placing it aside something even larger. Still, it's a trick that gets recycled so often (and always with the "1%" figure), that it becomes harder and harder to understand how that keeps its "freshness" as a promotional tool.

Think about how ludicrous it would be for me to expect 1% of the world's web surfers on a given day to view my site. That'd be millions of hits. I'd be one of the most famous bloggers out there (instead of my current state of being one of the most anonymous).

The reality is, just like there are too many blogs out there for anyone to get that "1%", there is too much competition in the overall "market" the one-percenters claim to target, for any but the extremely powerful companies of the world to be able to attain them. Certainly a tiny company, like REFR, cannot aspire to such levels at this point. And yet that's just what their shareholders have been led to do...