Luckily, 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.
Look out for non-competitor competitive alternatives: the things people use instead of using an actual product. This can be Post-It notes, an Excel spreadsheet that does not involve numbers, anything that is a general tool applied to a specific problem. These types of makeshift solutions are where you can find your critical problems—and that is where you can best serve your niche. ...
Analyze your competitors for what they do well and what they don’t when you do your market research. If you’ve done your problem validation right, you will see gaps in the market that are not yet served. Build your products around those gaps, and look into partnering with your competitors to expand each other’s customer base. ...
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.
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. ...
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.
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 if 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. ...
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. ...
Monopoly markets with just a few big players will severely limit your options. Markets where years of ruthless competition have created a large number of bottom feeders are hazardous. 充分竞争的市场也没戏,你打不过那些老家伙 usually are full of very similar competitors, fighting it out over price and marginal differences. This saturation makes it hard to enter a market, and even the businesses that are already in that market suffer. ...
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.
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?
Identifying a Critical Problem: Working on the Right Thing Once you have found a suitable audience, you can start looking for problems. The great thing about niche markets is that the issues in them are specific and shared by the people in the niche. Solving a common problem will help a lot of people. You already have the right people. Now you just need the right problem.
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.
先做个分类，核心 KPI 占用时间精力至少 60%以上。如果其他的杂活占用高于这个，就和领导沟通一下。不要抱怨活多，而是和领导说，担心影响核心 KPI 的完成度与质量。 通常领导有临时的杂活给你，多半不会考虑到你的工作量，可能就是随手指派的，或者他觉得交给你还 OK，不能惯。 ...
关于读书：养成一个读书习惯比读什么书更重要。我主要在 Kindle 上买书，用 iPad 阅读。目前在重读一些物理、历史、哲学相关的书。 关于习惯：早上健身 30 分钟是我最重要的习惯。另外习惯有冥想、阅读、减少饮酒和咖啡。 ...