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365 days of growth
by
Brandon Strellis
https://muntasirrashid.medium.com/365-days-of-growth-bootstrapping-from-0-to-225k-revenue-in-the-first-year-ec5ca565788a
TL;DR Building for everyone is building for no one.
Illustration: I've experimented with building newsletters in the past. Every time I broadened my target audience "to increase chances", quite the opposite happened, as it quickly gets much harder to market and grow.
Armed with this lesson, we've recently launched this newsletter with a clear audience in mind: tech founders looking to have a more powerful pitch or deck using Storytelling.
Spoiler alert: it works!
Yes 💯 I'm surrounded by entrepreneurs and the most common mistake is not knowing who your audience is (too broad, too narrow, etc.)
Not knowing who your audiences are is too bad, it will be very difficult to make progress.
A good niche makes your life as a founder so much easier - especially in marketing, but of course also in deciding between features and creating value.
The fun part? There is also more money in niches:
CRM - 19$/m
CRM for Service Biz - 49$/m
CRM for Corporate Lawyers - 199$/m
Start out in a niche and only spread to others once you dominate it.
Great point well made! Am I crazy to think that you could probably charge corporate lawyers 10x that much?? 😂
No, not at all. ;)
Absolutely amazing! Great work
I love the focus on the importance of user feedback (without letting it steer your direction).
Thanks for sharing!
Completely agree. It sounded like Muntasir and co were able to harness user feedback really effectively. It also sounded like they had a TON of conversations with users, something most founders don't manage to do, I think!
So many good takeaways from this!
Bonus if that person is yourself! That's why I love working on something that also scratches my own itch.
As an example, when I first got into cryptocurrency and blockchain I decided to build a simple dashboard which pulled market data from an aggregator. I also marketed it and ended up building a decent audience and userbase.
this is why joined indie hacker. I have been aware of Niche and marketing but examples like these just reinforce those learnings.
Absolutely. Hearing this stuff, then having it reinforced until it actually sinks in... Priceless!
I like that he mentions that he launched 80 times — that's huge. A lot of people don't realize that you can do this. There seems to be an idea (probably thanks to the term "launch") that you only launch once. Or maybe you can launch once on each of your favorite platforms. But there really are no rules here.
I came across an article here on IH a while back and it was a huge help for me. If you're think about launching multiple time (and you should IMO) then check out this list of places to launch — it'll save you a lot of time: Relaunch like a pro: 100+ places to launch, relaunch, and list your product
With that said, it should also be noted that launching constantly isn't the way either. Launches give you spurts. But to find your way to sustained momentum, you need a lot more than that (as his article implies).
Absolutely! That was an eye-opener for me for sure. And he does a good job stressing that launches are important to getting engagement and keeping your customers excited, but that they are still just part of the larger part of finding product-market fit.
Thanks for sharing that link, looks super helpful!
My biggest successes have been the most niche specific.
Really loved the emphasis Muntasir @muntasir put on moving away from the solution for everyone to the solution for a very specific person. I've been thinking about this a lot in my own entrepreneurial ideation. As a young person, I think I (and maybe most of us?) thought naturally in terms of wanting to help 'everyone'. But, in fact, it's far more effective to deal with the people who you actually understand to the greatest possible extent.
Anybody else out there making the transition from helping everyone ineffectively to helping a specific someone effectively? 😂
Here is a quote that we should remember "If you sell to everyone, you sell to no one" and of course the infamous "Riches is in the niches". As a founder myself, I have learned this the hard way.
I'd never heard "riches is in the niches"! 😂😂
Well, now you do :)
I agree it's useful to deal with those you understand. Though I do think there are valid reasons for intentionally trying to "help everyone".
An example of a strategy which has proven to work is to combine benefits and features of multiple applications into one (e.g. all-in-one social media management tools). In that case you could be taking on many people's problems. You could be building something for teams with different roles, or building a platform which needs to address both sides.
To me it's a potential competitive advantage. It requires a much greater deal of time and I see that as a barrier to entry.
"Building for all is a recipe for disaster." Totally!! But as a young person myself, I do understand the urge to do that. In a way, it's hard to think about helping LESS than everyone. Right? Like... everybody deserves help!
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This is super cool: "the feedback, growth and user satisfaction is improving significantly."
Great point about p2p. That's one of the business models that I've been thinking about the most. You've gotta know who your people are!
Thanks again for the interesting read. Sounds like other people got a lot out of it, too!
It's a beautiful story, thank for sharing,
Nice
Finding your niche provides so much clarity & focus and frees up so much head space.
What are your primary channels for building in public and letting others know about the work that you are doing?
This comment was deleted 4 years ago