Sometimes we look for immutable things like age or gender niches. Other times the specifics we’re interested in are fluid things like preferences or experience levels. Some niches can be large enough to contain millions of people, and others might just consist of a handful of individuals.
The makers of Bud Light spend more than $1.5 billion every year. They do that because they need to be present in the mind of every single shopper when they think of getting a beer.
What unites all niches is that they are inclusive of some and exclusive of others. The members of the in-group will be reasonably similar, depending on the specificity of the niche. That’s why niches work so well for bootstrapped businesses: if you can provide a tool that solves a niche problem very well, you can be sure that everyone in the niche will be interested in it. ...
A craft beer company might put up flyers in a local pub that is serving lots of craft beers, or allocate a budget to exhibiting at beer festivals. A niche business will market to its niche and no one else.
If you filter a large group of people by several specific properties, you will end up with an audience that shares those properties. As a result, these people will also share many other things that can make building products and selling them very convenient.
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.