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Tips on niching down?

Did you go through the process of niching down to find more success with a targeted customer?

How did that go for you? What kind of transformation did it require? How granular did you get with your targeting, and how did you market to those targeted customers?

on November 7, 2020
  1. 3

    Keyword tools can be helpful for this... UberSuggest is a good free one.

  2. 3

    Read a book called positioning by Al Ries. Then read his 2nd version called Repositioning and then read 22 immutable laws of marketing.

    All rather short reads but you'll get all you need from them with stellar examples and frameworks.

  3. 2

    I just went through an exercise in niching down for the product I'm building and wrote about my process here.

    In short, it involved 3 steps:

    1. Evaluate possible niche categories - I broke down users by industry, job function, and company profile. Then I combined these categories into more specific niches.
    2. Set criteria - I had 4: niche size, distribution channels, personal experience, and problem severity.
    3. Evaluate potential categories on that criteria.

    I go into a lot more detail in my article as part of a process I'm calling The MVP Sprint.

    Good luck!

  4. 1

    As @TheWonderingZall had commented, my approach is also closer to “being more specific” rather than “niche-ing down”.

    Here’s what happened for the mini-project I’m working on: MTRN.ME is a URL shortener for podcasts. So the target market is “podcasters”.

    Iteration 1: all podcasters
    Iteration 2: podcasters putting out new-ish shows
    Iteration 3: podcasters with new-ish shows who don’t already use URL shorteners in their Twitter/IG bios

    To some extent, it’s about identifying the persona that has the problem you’re trying to solve. And in any case, the ends justify the means, whether it’s coming up with a good persona, being more specific or “niche-ing down” :)

  5. 1

    I’m not a big fan of the word niche or the phrase “niching down”🤦🏻‍♂️

    A easier approach is just being more specific.

    For example, the way I “niched down”, was just specifying who would benefit the most from my product.

    In my case, it was devs, freelancers and solo-founders who are all trying to make tiny internet businesses.