I drove to the airport after the Wall Street Journal Conference with Colin Angle, the CEO of iRobot. I must admit that iRobot is a cool name for a company. Its one of the better uses of the "i" or "e" naming trick (e.g., iMovie, eToys, etc.) I've seen. iRobot touts itself as a leading robotics company that is "building robotic products that make life safer and easier for people in many walks of life." The problem for iRobot is trying to serve those "many walks of life" simultaneously.

You've probably seen iRobot's biggest selling product. It is a robotic vacuum cleaner called the Roomba. It looks a bit like some of the more successful combatants on Robot Wars. Ironically, my wife and I had been joking about the Roomba on the way down to the conference, as we happened upon it while perusing the ever-amusing Sky Mall magazine (none other than Andrew Anker won a Roomba in a drawing at the TED conference this year — I'll have to ask him how he likes it). The Roomba is actually getting great traction in the retail world and Colin gave me a tutorial on product marketing through the home shopping channels.

What struck me as the most interesting challenge Colin faces in building his business was not the vagaries of consumer marketing (although that will continue to be a challenge for the Roomba) but, rather, the difficulty of selling to massively disjointed markets. At the same time that iRobot is selling its $200 self propelled vacuum cleaner, it is also building all terrain surveillance robots that are being used for all sorts of military and police applications (such as sweeping Afghan caves) and the internal logic for the My Real Baby doll. It is true, as Colin points out, that all these things are problems that can be solved with robotics. But that does not go very far when it comes to sales and marketing.

The problem is that it is will be hard for iRobot to gain credibility and build market momentum in one vertical based upon the success of its products in other verticals. It is highly unlikely that the military officer charged with sourcing a surveillance robot will be more inclined to purchase from iRobot as a result of mass market penetration of their roving auto vac. And it is equally unlikely that a parent will be more inclined to buy their child a My Real Baby because its innards are built by the folks who brought you My Self Cleaning Rugbot and My First Cave Sweeping Pal.

Startups are small and have limited resources. Therefore, in most instances, it makes good sense to pick a market and build it out first before jumping into other markets, no matter how promising they may look from a far. A company like iRobot would be well served to pick the market that it views as most promising for near term penetration (both in terms of breadth of coverage and revenue generation) and stayed focused on that market for some time. If it turns out that the market you pick does not prove as fruitful as you had thought earlier, you can always change course and chase another market. But spreading your company too thin when it is still resource constrained can result in the inability to capitalize on the successes you may achieve and will make those successes less likely in the first place.