I built an innovative product and have 0️⃣ competitors. How to find a niche?

The idea of listening for brand mentions isn't a new concept or business opportunity, which works in your favor. There have been firms that have monitored major newspapers and created scrapbooks and snail mailed or emailed them to the brand manager. Even product placements in TV and movies were screened. Previously this was PR services. If mentioned in the WSJ, sometimes they would even put it on a frame.

Even a quick Google search for youtube brand mentions comes up with paid ads & listicals of directions and SaaS that do this concept, so there's at least some version of this on the market, could just be listening to comments and not the spoken words.

How might you get customers? Take a step back and review the trusted Customer Value Journey. You'll need to create some educational items because a quick look at a tool I use ranks it so low they don't have data, but you can see in an incognito window ads someone takes out for google searches of 'youtube mention monitoring' and those would possibly be connectors.

Webinars are also your friend to introduce it. Highlight other tools to 'Selecting Tools for Media Mentions' and maybe you invite someone else and you compare/contrast.

OK -- so now we have to think 'who might have already collected our users or influencers?' so now we do a search for the competitors that are similar but may not have the same featureset (yet, until they acquire you for $$$$).

Companies in the space:
https://twitter.com/mention (22k followers) and a quick look has tons of their possible users and industry players.
https://twitter.com/Meltwater (24k followers) more users and industry players.

OK you get the point... so now what do you do? Depends on time.

Now you can create a LIST on Twitter, 'Awesome PR Leaders' 'Top Social Media Consultants' etc and then you go through and add people from those followers to your list. Why? Well, you get on their phone. Everyone who gets added to a list 1) gets notified and 2) starts looking at the list to see who else is on there and if you do it from the VideoMentions handle and you have a great bio they just may follow you and start to go through the inquiry phase.

So now you build your followers, that's part of the battle, now you have to generate content for them to consume. Examples of use (you likely don't have case studies but they would go here). Can do content on current trends like the Will Smith, whatever else your tool can pull. Create those reports and publish them and have a call to action.

Keep in mind people usually have to see marketing materials 18 times before they react or engage.

Then you have listicals to be include on; producthunt (although likely not your long term client), any of the ones your competitors are on even including G2.

And then on the competitors there's this really cool thing that the companies put their customers on -- there's nothing stopping you from finding the social media manager or team for the competitor products, backdoor find their emails then start your email campaign (but don't do it under your main domain, use multiple domains and warm them up like GetVideoMentions.io MonitoredByVideoMentions.com etc.)

So there you go. Some random ideas. I like what you're doing! Just hope the financial calculations are there so it is worth your while!

Then here's an off the wall idea depending if your software does it... How might we use it for detecting companies that are starting to trend and then buy the stock? That'd be one hell of a product you could charge a lot of money for if you figure out how to do it.