In 1995, a shoe brand came back from the dead, and the story we still tell about it is about the wrong half of the comeback. Hush Puppies, the classic American brushed-suede shoes, were down to 30,000 pairs a year, sold mostly through backwoods outlets and small-town family stores, and Wolverine, the company that made them, was thinking of phasing them out. Then the brand tipped. Isaac Mizrahi wore them. Designers John Bartlett and Anna Sui put them in their shows. In 1995 the company sold 430,000 pairs, and the next year four times that, and the year after that still more.
How many people started it? Malcolm Gladwell, who told the story in The Tipping Point, asked the question himself: "Twenty? Fifty? One hundred - at the most?" His answer became the most retold idea in modern marketing. When we say a handful of East Village kids started the Hush Puppies epidemic, he wrote, "what we are really saying is that in a given process or system some people matter more than others." Find the right few, the connectors and the mavens, and you reach everyone through them, essentially for free.
A network scientist named Duncan Watts spent years trying to find those people, and could not.
The search for the special few
Watts did not start out hostile to the idea. He started by testing a piece of evidence Gladwell himself leaned on: the famous small-world experiment, where letters crossed the country in about six hops. In 2001, Watts and his colleagues rebuilt that experiment at email scale. Sixty-one thousand one hundred sixty-eight people from 166 countries took part in 24,163 message chains aimed at 18 targets around the world. The small-world part held up. The special-people part did not. Chains that found their target ran through ordinary people, not through hubs: in the Science paper's own words, individuals in successful chains "were far less likely than those in incomplete chains to send messages to hubs," and social search "appears to be largely an egalitarian exercise," not one that depends on "a small minority of exceptional individuals."
Then he went after the influentials directly. In simulations with Peter Sheridan Dodds, published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2007, Watts built virtual societies of 10,000 people, handed the most connected 10 percent four times the reach of everyone else, and started trends at random to see who started the big ones. The cascades came. Most did not start with the connected few. Change the society instead - make everyone slightly more open to adopting what their neighbors adopted - and the number of large cascades skyrocketed, no special people required. The paper's own summary still reads like a door closing on a fifty-year assumption: large cascades of influence are driven not by influentials but "by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals."
So Watts flipped the question, and this is the half I think every audience builder should keep. The cascade does not depend on who lights it. It depends on whether the forest is ready. In a 2008 Fast Company interview he put it in a sentence I have not improved on: "If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one" - and if it isn't, "then almost no one can". The matching image is his too: a landscape where thousands of fires start and few become monsters, and where nobody credits the match, because the woods were dry.
What readiness means for a small audience
Here is my opinion, and it is a real one. Most advice about building an audience is advice about finding better people to tell. Find the newsletter that matters, the community that decides, the account with the following. Watts's work says the receiver, not the sender, holds the leverage, and that the thing to engineer is the audience's state - whether the people arriving are in a moment where your category is a need.
That sounds mystical, so make it concrete. You cannot buy readiness, but you can position next to it. A person browsing a leaderboard of new sites and apps is not a random human. They arrived somewhere - a feed, a search, a friend's link - already interested in discovering something. That is a small pocket of readiness, and one you do not have to assemble person by person.
The buyer's move is the opposite of the connector hunt, and it is cheaper. You stop paying for the hunt and start paying for position next to the assembled crowd. A bid on this board is exactly that: rank is total bid value this month, the board resets on the 1st, and every placement is labeled as the advertising it is.
The fires that do not depend on a spark
I am not going to tell you the Law of the Few is dead. Watts himself never claimed the simulations settled it; the paper says its results "do not exclude the possibility that influentials can be important." What the work does kill is the search for a shortcut through special people. If almost anyone can start a ready trend, then the rare and bankable thing is not the starter. It is the ready room.
The rest of the Hush Puppies story agrees with him, and almost nobody tells this part. The shoes were what they were in 1995 - the same brushed suede they had been in 1985 - and the same kids had been walking past resale racks in the Village for years. What changed was the moment, and whoever happened to pick them up first. A handful of kids in the East Village were, in Watts's term, accidental. The woods were dry. If it had not been them, it would have been somebody else.
So skip the hunt for the right few. Put your site where people are already looking for something new, and let the crowd supply the readiness.
As I write this, the top spot is open at one dollar - take it, and be the match the room was waiting for.