What is the best way to reach a niche market?
I'm a first time founder and I thought I was doing myself a favor by making my target customer base as niche as possible. Now that I have a product and I am in marketing and sales mode, I feel like I made a mistake…
Within my niche, there are approximately 5 segments of ways you can use "Liquid" (the technology Dropkiq helps with). In other words, every community I join to try to reach this audience, there is a good chance that the person is not the correct segment to be my target customer.
Has anyone else here experienced this problem? I'm curious what insights there are from this community?
Hi! A few observations:
- I'd refrain from building a product to cater to someone you don't know. If you don't know how to reach this market segment and don't understand them, it's a good indication that the idea is doomed from the start.
- Finding that every customer doesn't fit your audience probably isn't a good sign either.
I don't know your startup, but I'd consider pivoting seriously or doing a LOT of customer discovery.
I found answering the 5 questions here very helpful: https://doineedalandingpage.com/
While focusing on a niche market is significantly more difficult, it's not impossible. There are ALWAYS people that could benefit from any type of service, obviously the key is finding those people. I finally realized this when I saw a local company that all they do is pick up dog poop, I see them all over town, so they are clearly busy.
Finding those users is the hard part and it sounds like you are to the point where you need to focus on finding those people over building more features on the site.
First, I suspect you will need to do a LOT of very targeted ads. Second, follow everyone your competitors follow on social media and learn how they are doing sales / marketing. Third, keep digging and researching, answer related questions on Quora, write lots of blog posts. Fourth, publish the site on every "startup" listing site you can find. Fifth, find tools that compliment your service and reach out to people using those tools. Sixth, it's going to take a LONG time to see significant growth, sounds like it's going to be a slow grind. But if it doesn't really cost you anything to run, then that's perfectly fine.
Continue your marketing, stop working on the site itself and build a second service that compliments the first that might have a wider net for getting people's attention. Then cross link between the two sites.
Hope that helps.
Maybe talk to https://twitter.com/DaltonEdwards - he might be able to use it in his code editor for https://1mb.site/
Oh, and for your "Pro" account, just say the pricing. Nothing is more infuriating than having to contact you to know what the pricing is. All that "contact for pricing" tells me, is that the service is really expensive, so I'm probably not going to buy it anyway, so why reach out to actually find out?
Good insights, thanks for sharing. Honest question: how do you do all of the above AND do full-time painting AND deal with family & kids?? I can barely manage cooking & laundry… 😅
@poppacalypse The secret is I drop the ball all the time.
- Quite a few of my projects sort of "run themselves" or I have put on the back-burner so I don't dedicate a ton of time to them, few follow up emails or social media every once in a while.
- My more successful projects I dedicate more time to, I might focus really hard on one or two projects for a week and flush out the UI (html/css) and prep to hand off to my back-end developer. Then he spends a week or two working on the back-end code and I jump to other projects and work on them for a bit, rinse and repeat.
- I do basic social media stuff, some of it is partially automated (i.e. I just have to click a few buttons)
- I'm constantly behind on front-end related stuff though for sure, so you just have to learn to prioritize and jump on what is motivating you at any given moment. A little bit of effort on a lot of things actually goes a long way.
- I'm officially to the point that I'm "too busy" so I have been scaling back a bit this year since nothing is overly urgent for me to get done.
The painting stuff consumes most of my days for sure and generates 99% of my revenue. With that said, my actual time spent is relatively small compared to when I was trying to do design as a day job. So I might work 3-4 hard painting days a week, but then have the rest of the days off to network or work on other things. Sometimes I might have a full week off, which opens up my schedule quite a bit.
My "on-job" hours last year was only about 625, or roughly 12 hours per week. Yet I grossed as much as I did working basically full time as a freelance designer. So I'm making a lot with relatively minimal effort, which frees up a lot of time for other projects.
The wife knits a lot and my kids play a lot of video games (too many) and we all like to stay at home, so that's fairly easy to balance. Basically 5pm-9pm is family time and usually the wife and I have one evening each where we are out doing some sort of activity (I'm bowling on Monday evenings and she does Knit Group Thursday nights).
I don't sleep well, so I'm up quite late. Often heading to bed at 1 or 2 am and then getting up by 7:30AM. So I'm a night owl and my wife is the opposite, she gets up at like 5AM, so evenings I'm usually free to do what I want since everyone else is in bed already.
It's that easy :) I actually kind of consider myself to be fairly lazy, I go to a lot of movies, I sit on the couch looking at Imgur a lot, I take more naps than I should.
I hope to write up some of those topics in more detail as others have asked as well. Just need to find the time and motivation. :)
@micahiverson Wow. Looks like I might have to take up painting 😅 jk Thanks again for the great insight. I am doing the 'bit of effort on a lot of things' atm, and hopefully it'll all bubble up into something someday.
Can't really help you find or make time, but is there any way we (as in Makerloggers) help motivate you to write up on these topics? :)
@poppacalypse Painting is a great side-gig for sure, I suggest it to people all the time and wish I had started 10 years ago, I was to stubborn and didn't want to do physical labor anymore and only wanted to focus on design/tech.
Just keep hounding me about it, then I'll focus on writing stuff up :)
@micahiverson haha hound you? i don't want to get blocked!
I know what you mean about physical labor. I've just come out of 13 years in F&B and would like to heal from that before considering anything physical again. I'm really glad you found a good balance; that's something I need to think about - physical for just a few hours (vs the crazy 14-hour shifts I used to do) in exchange for good cash.
Sorry to hijack the thread @akdarrah , but hope you found some of this insightful, too! :)
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