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Tyler Perry has carved a lucrative niche ($400+ million) from producing theater, television, and film for a specific audience—black, church-going women and families. Any entrepreneur can learn from his success.

1) Focus on an audience. His stories revolve around powerful black maternal characters and intertwine themes that allow for social commentary, comedy, inspiration, and a little gospel, all of which cater to the black community.

2) Theater as a prototype. The intimacy and instant feedback allowed him to refine his characters with each performance and learn what tugged at the audiences emotions.

3) Film as a public beta. Leveraging his passionate theater audience, Perry produced his first film, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, on a relatively meager $5.5 million budget. This was his product launch. The movie grossed $50.5 million at the box office affirming his characters and stories were on track.

4) Television to scale: After a string of hits on the big screen, his sitcoms Meet the Browns and Tyler Perry’s House of Pain scale his product to audiences who may have not seen his films.

The major studios may not have found value in entertaining such a small audience, but Perry did.