Hunting Elephants VS Flies: How Many Customers You Need To Be Successful

There are lots of ways to build a 1-million-dollar business. You just have to understand what kind of customers you are “hunting”. If your customers are high-level enterprise subscribers paying 100,000 dollars each, you’ll need 10. If they are medium-sized business partners paying 10,000 dollars each, you’ll need 100. If they are tiny companies using your services paying 1,000 dollars each, you’ll need 1000. If they are typical consumers paying you a hundred bucks, you’ll need 10,000. And if they are active customers who you gather at least 10 dollars from, you’ll need 100,000. That’s the difference between hunting elephants and flies.

Salespeople often differentiate between elephants, rabbits, and flies when they’re talking about the categories of customers. Others call them whales, sharks, big fish, and small fish. What you call the divisions does not matter. All you need to understand is that, depending on your desired revenues, and the customers you are “hunting” or “fishing”, your business strategy will differ. If you are hunting so-called flies, you’ll need hundreds of thousands of customers — think social platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook.

Whereas if you are fishing for bigger fish, you’ll need vastly less to meet your desired cashflows. If these are medium-sized fish, you’ll need a large following, but not WhatsApp-scale virality. Something like Notion or MailChimp. Doable using paid marketing — with a massive, VC-backed budget, of course. Whereas if you are baiting larger fish, you might get away with dedicated outreach teams and a robust sales force. This will probably be a SaaS-type business where you provide a product, tech, or marketing playbook to another company. The point remains: targeting large companies or customers — elephants or whales — requires a vastly different strategy than does aiming at smaller consumers — small fish and flies.

When thinking elephants, think major contracts with multinational corporations or launching a breakthrough product that disrupts an entire industry. There’s a large, long-term payoff. At the same time, elephants typically require huge upfront time, capital, and strategic investment. When picturing flies, think small sales deals, incremental business improvements, or minor product launches that slightly improve the customer experience. The risk is low and so is the resource investment. Each fly adds little, but their cumulative impact becomes significant over time. These are smaller deals that contribute modest gains individually but large rewards collectively. A failure when hunting elephants means you get stomped — the risk, uncertainty, and investment is high. Flies are more newbie-friendly — the opportunity to build momentum is there, the risk is low, and the returns are, if smaller, at least more predictable.

Real-life implications of hunting elephants versus flies:

• Tech Startup: their elephant could be developing a high-level, disruptive app that can dominate an entire industry segment. Whereas their flies could be a consumer application that fulfills a basic need.

• Retail Business: launching a new product line that revolutionizes business-to-business transactions might be their elephant. Whilst optimizing local store layouts and customer service processes can boost day-to-day sales to flies.

• Service Industry: securing a big contract with an even bigger corporation can redefine a service provider’s revenue streams. Whereas small, high-value, consumer-level features like short courses can be a net for flies.

How you might use hunting elephants versus flies as a mental model: (1) scan the environment — watch out for opportunities to shoot an elephant (a large-scale sell) and catch flies (a small improvement), something like a gap in skills you posses and can train organizations in (elephant opportunity); (2) evaluate the cost — assess how time-consuming, financially burdensome, and risky each opportunity is to see whether the returns are worth it; (3) align with your objective — if steady growth is the priority, build nets for flies, if a rapid yet risky transformation is the goal, prioritize elephants; (4) stay flexible — reserve a portion of your resources for high-impact, high-risk elephants, while maintaining consistency on smaller projects to attract a stream of flies; (5) track everything — monitor both your foundation of consumers (flies) and your business partners (elephants), and adjust your product or service as needed.