Business

Like in machine learning, you run the risk of “overfitting” your niche; you might get too specific. There could be a few hundred “Star Trek fans that live in the New Orleans area and love to eat Quinoa,” but that won’t sustain a bootstrapped business. ...

A problem we experienced for ourselves. So we solved it for ourselves. We then saw that other teachers, just like Danielle, could benefit from our solution. They had the exact same problem. We knew our first version already solved the problem well. That’s why we knew other teachers would pay for it.

Can They Pay? Will They Pay? Sometimes, you will be serving companies that have a budget for what you offer. Other times, you could help a currently underserved segment of a low-wage industry. The capacity and willingness to pay will be very different between those two.

Is the Audience Large Enough? Your audience will have to be big enough to sustain your business. It will likely also have to support competitors, as any successful business will attract competition. Is the Audience Small Enough? Contrary to popular belief, I think that for a bootstrapped company, in particular, some markets can be too big. Some audiences are too generic, some industries too vast for a great niche to exist. At least, in the beginning, you should have a clearly defined niche. As a bootstrapped entrepreneur, you will reach out to customers and be in direct contact. ...

If you have found a painful problem, a niche audience that is both small and big enough for your business, and you have made sure your audience is willing to pay for your solution, you have found your niche. From here you can build out your product and marketing strategies for that market.

Knowing whether you need to focus more on sales or on marketing is very important. Some markets require you to reach out to buyers individually. For others, a good and well-targeted marketing strategy could mean you will never have to talk to a single customer before they subscribe or purchase. Being aware of how this will develop over time is essential in order to decide where to focus your attention. ...

What Are Good Markets for Bootstrapped SaaS? If you see that significant forces are terraforming a market, creating an opportunity where there was none before, that is a good sign. Whenever a new kind of technology or process gets traction in a field that has not seen much change before, it will create little points of friction. Some of them will be critical. These will be the ones that warrant creating a SaaS business. ...

Monopoly markets dominated by a few major players severely limit your options. Markets where years of relentless competition have produced numerous underdogs are dangerous. Even fully competitive markets offer little hope, as you cannot compete against established giants. These markets are typically filled with very similar competitors, battling over prices and minor differences. This saturation makes it difficult to enter such markets, and even existing businesses within them struggle.

Enterprise markets are hard to sell into for a small company, although it’s not impossible. Purchasing decisions take a long time, there are a lot of requirements even to be considered, and contracts tend to be custom and require a lot of work. Many enterprise customers won’t buy from small companies out of fear they will vanish within a few years, and that fear is not unfounded. In fact, even for your own bootstrapped business, I would recommend against using services offered by companies smaller than yourself. You will be better off looking for a market that is comprised of small to medium-sized businesses and self-employed freelancers. ...

When markets shrink, that is often a sign of deterioration. Whenever the number of agents and purchasers in a market decreases, business growth stalls. People cut costs and unnecessary expenses get reduced. All businesses in that market will suffer.

Identifying a Critical Problem: Focusing on the Right Issue After identifying your target audience, you can begin searching for their pain points. The beauty of niche markets lies in the fact that the issues they face are specific and shared among members of the niche. Addressing a common issue will benefit many individuals. You already have the right people; now you simply need the right problem.

When you’re starting a bootstrapped SaaS business, you have to find a painful problem to solve. For that, you have to find an audience first. But how do you figure out if the audience is big enough to support your business today and five years from now?

You are looking for painful problems, and you want to solve the most painful of them all. You also need to validate that this is an actual problem that people need to have addressed. Sometimes, we just want to complain, but we don’t want to change our ways. You will need to find a problem so painful that we just have to deal with it.

重复是成功之母。90%以上的成功来自于模仿和重复，而不是来自于创新。 一个人之所以会不想做重复的事，大多是这种情况：这人没做成过什么事，所以没成功的经验。 模仿是最高效的捷径 上学是模仿尖子生、打工模仿优秀员工、做产品是模仿爆款、做自媒体时模仿网红，殊途同归。 ...

A few weeks into teaching on a full-time schedule, she noticed things that started as nuisances but quickly became painful problems. The teaching part of her job was great and fun, but certain formalities took way too much additional time.

So, we released it to the public, built a landing page, and waited. Nothing happened. One or two people signed up for the free trial, but there wasn’t much else. We hadn’t done any marketing, and we hadn’t made any sales. The service just sat there, idling.

We found out that many other teachers did the same when they started talking about their self-built solutions in their online communities. Teachers began to share their templates through Google sheets. It was clear that this was a shared problem in a very tight-knit community. There was a sizeable market with an apparent, shared, and critical problem. The problem was solvable, but no one had yet built anything to make it noticeably easier. ...

And then, one day, everything changed. In a comment to a Facebook post about how teachers dealt with feedback, Danielle dropped the link to our product with an explanation of how she used it. Teachers started to respond, asking for more details; they checked out the program and came back to share their newly found discovery on social media.

that fueled the growth of our business from its first few users to thousands of customers a couple of months later. It was surreal, but we had tapped into a highly active tribe. Once we understood that, we didn’t need to do much when it came to marketing our product: our users would do most of that for us.

For many of our customers, teaching from home was a side hustle. Using our product enabled many of them to turn this into a full-time source of income. We priced our service to be affordable and easily justified. We even increased our prices by 50% a year into running the business, and it continued growing nevertheless.