How to Find Your Niche in Business
Finding your ideal niche in any market is a fundamental component in successfully launching any business endeavor.
Starting and/or running any type of business is no easy task. There are a million things that can go wrong at any given time, causing you to suffer a lack of revenue, loss of clients/ customers, or a complete shutdown of your entire business.
Among the many challenges all entrepreneurs face is often times a mismatch of skills/ service to your ideal niche.
The textbook definition of market niche is:
"the subset of the market on which a specific product is focused. The market niche defines the product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that it is intended to target. It is also a small market segment".
Finding your ideal niche in any market is a fundamental part of successfully launching any business endeavor. It is also critical to attempt to serve a niche with which you are intimately familiar, or at the very least, have a real passion to explore and conquer. Some niche markets may seem pretty obvious. Others are quite unclear and sometimes require some serious research and development. For this reason, one must have a sustained interest in exploring your potential marketplace.
Such interest is always built on a genuine passion to succeed in your chosen business. Ralph Lauren, some would say, dominated, and still dominates the world of Men's business casual apparel. But when he started, he knew nothing about fashion. It was his passion and will to succeed that drove him and kept him focused on his goals. Heck, he even changed his last name from Lipschitz to Lauren to help him fit into the world of fashion, as it were at that time.
Although there are no set steps to help discover your "right" niche, there are some common conditions that make finding your ideal niche easier.
Passion and Interest
It is important to try to compile two lists, one of the topics or types of businesses you are interested in, and another of your skills or educational background. In there somewhere, the intersection of interest and skill is where you probably want to start.
Whatever you intend to do you must feel the connection to it, one probably dating pretty far back in your life and that is why it has to blend with your passion and interest.
According to CB Insights, the top reason for all new business failures in a lack of need in the marketplace. The SBA also that five out of ten businesses fail in the first year. The vast majority of startup funds (82 percent) came from the entrepreneur himself or herself, or family and friends.
So you see, in any new business, as an entrepreneur, the odds are stacked against you. You need all the sustained interest, passion, and get-up-and-keep-going that you can get.
Spot a Need in the Marketplace
What is that dire need in the society or a problem that you can solve? If you can clearly identify an underserved market or a "big" problem the other big guys have left unsolved, then you are on your way to finding your niche.
Most great success stories in businesses were a result of being able to solve some nagging problem within a well-defined marketplace. Netflix did not invent the world of movie rentals, it just took out the pain of having to physically go to video rental stores to get and return movies. That's how they came to dominate the space. Not to mention, investing heavily in their streaming business and creating original content.
Is this a problem you can solve with your current skills? If so, then you are on the right path.
Scope out the competition
Do some research to see who your direct and indirect competitors are. The idea here is not to imitate them or even try to unseat them, Vis-à-vis take their customers. The Idea is to check out what the details of their services are, where they fall short according to their customers, etc. For software entrepreneurs, you will be amazed at what you can learn by reading the customer reviews of your competitors.
Make a list of all the complaints they get, specific to product features and note what issues are repeated most often.
For eCommerce startups, you can visit www.Amazon.com to get to know the top sellers and what they are selling to identify the market gap. Or you can explore keywords that are frequently searched. The easiest way to get this information is by using keywords search tool www.wordtracker.com.