Recent Articles

From a goal, you can usually infer a problem that is in the way of your customers’ path to success. Solve that problem, and you can help everyone in the niche reach their goals.

People in your niche will likely have the same problems. If they love fantasy football, they all need to keep track of their teams. If they enjoy fly-fishing, they all need to find information on where to fish and how the weather will impact their chances of a catch. If you spend enough time investigating the problems of your niche, you will sooner or later surface their critical problems. These are the things that are common roadblocks for everyone in the niche. Solving that problem with a dedicated product will allow you to have a high chance of success with your bootstrapped business. ...

You can become a tribal leader yourself. There is ample room for many leaders within most niche tribes. In such a position, you are considered an expert who also offers products specifically designed for members of the tribe.

Shared interests will allow you to speak to the needs of your niche audience directly. Creating content that has a lot of impact and will be read by a lot of people will be easier, as there is less competition for your audience’s attention.

People derive their identity from belonging to a tribe. If you can position your business in such a way that makes your product something that “people in our tribe use,” then you will have a guaranteed sales funnel for as long as your niche exists.

Partnerships in niches become a much more lucrative endeavor. Additional exposure and reach results in quick win-win situations, where both partners can significantly boost both their customer base and their reputation as an expert in the niche. Partnering up with other players in the niche allows you to reach customers at different stages of “niche proficiency,” increasing the breadth of your sales funnel. ...

If you lead a tribe, it will eventually do the marketing for you. A large following will amplify your messages with a lot of reach, giving you credibility and encouraging newcomers to become customers so they can belong to the tribe.

She became an advocate for the needs of these teachers, and they followed her actively on social media, engaging in conversations, spreading the word, and, best of all, even defending the company and the product against people who dismissed or publicly disliked it. That’s the power of a tribe.

If you give people the opportunity to share your content and messages with other tribe members, they will. The interconnected nature of tribes facilitates this rapid exchange of information, and if you leverage those channels, your product will sell itself. At FeedbackPanda, it took one well-placed social media comment to start an avalanche of word-of-mouth referrals that lasted for years.

Fortunately, these influencers are also much cheaper to partner with than the prominent super-influencers. Often, they are not even aware of their influence, or they don’t necessarily see it as a monetizable activity. While I recommend you still offer them reasonable compensation, you can approach niche influencers as potential partners instead of just seeing them as a marketing channel.

If your product is shareable, spend time on creating a referral system early in the life of your business. If it’s not shareable, defer this kind of system until you have exhausted better, more effective marketing techniques.

When conducting market research, analyze your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. If you have properly validated your problem, you will identify market gaps that are currently unserved. Build your products around these gaps and consider partnering with your competitors to expand each other’s customer base.

Watch out for non-competitive competitive alternatives: the tools people use instead of using an actual product. This can include Post-it notes, an Excel spreadsheet that doesn’t involve numbers, or any general tool applied to a specific problem. These types of makeshift solutions are where you can identify your critical problems—and that’s where you can best serve your niche.

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 bootstrapped business works best when it starts out in a niche. Most companies will do really well by just staying there. Some expand into other markets. But that initial audience is one of the most important things to carefully select when you start a 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. ...