If you've got an idea and you decide to put time and energy on it, it's really important to identify soon what shape you want to give to your business and what target your initiative will have.  Let's suppose you choose to set up a revolutionary service you can deliver through the Internet, using a web application that you have invented. Before you start coding or designing anything, it's really important you take a moment to consider how answering to some fundamentals questions. The first question you always face is what your target users are.

You could project your initiative to address consumers people or to address business professionals.

Which one to choose?

Remember: targeting business users is easier than targeting consumer ones. If you design and set up a useful service through the web and you think you can make some money renting it, it's definitely better and safer trying to bet on business users, if only they can appreciate the opportunity to save some money and rent your software instead of buying a package or implementing their in house solution.

For example, to provide your company with a calendar sharing solution, you could choose Microsoft Exchange. That can be generally considered a good choice, even if it's not exactly the cheapest one. On the other hand, the Internet is full of calendar solutions that can represent a good alternative to the adoption of Exchange. You can typically evaluate them for free on a period of at least 30 days, and then deciding to rent them for few bucks a month. 

Deciding to provide services to the consumer market is of course possible but definitely tougher. Think about YouTube, Flickr, Google or to the new born Twitter. They all are targeting the consumer market and they are probably among the most famous digital known brands. They have many things in common: they all received several millions of dollars in VC funding, they all have a huge market value, they haven't understood how they could make money until they get big, and even if they have payable subscription plans, they make the real money through advertising. 

Why? Because normal people have been used to have access to a great amount of Internet services for free. 

All these initiatives focus their efforts on setting up a community, and that's a costly thing to do. You need infrastructure, you need bandwidth, you need web designers, software programmers, project managers, marketing people and you need money to be spent on making your brand well known.

Do you know what happen when people put a big quantity of money in your company? You lose control of what you created.

Want to build the next billion company? Good luck, it's more likely you win the national lottery.

On the contrary, deciding to go create simple but effective business product can make you on the right way to set up a 1 million dollar company in a few years (if you a re lucky) - as perfectly explained by David Henemeir Hansson at the Start Up School 2008 last April at the  Stanford University.