Bill Taylor’s short profile of 37 Signals looks at the upside of building small products for small companies:
Most technology companies are obsessed with the “enterprise” market — Fortune 500 giants with complicated problems and big budgets. 37Signals builds software for entrepreneurs and small companies where the executives who buy the product also use the product — a market that they call the Fortune 5,000,000: “We solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to everyone else,” the company likes to say.
Software and publishing aren’t completely analogous, but with ebooks, digital delivery and print-on-demand, there’s certainly an opportunity for book publishers to serve smaller markets with smaller publications.