Today I want to talk about finding your niche for your business. First, I’ll define what a niche is for those who might not be familiar. A niche is a very small, very specific subset of the general population.
In business, your niche is your lifeline. It’s your lane, and it’s vital that you find your lane and stay in it. In other words, be narrow down what you sell and who you sell it to.
Many people who are new to entrepreneurship find the concept of picking a niche rather difficult. Even experienced entrepreneurs struggle with it sometimes. Most people want to sell as many of their products or services to as many people as possible, so it seems counter intuitive to exclude large swaths of people by narrowing your audience and product offering down.
It’s natural. We all want to make a shit ton of money! But trying to sell everything to every one is not the way to go. The more laser focused you are about what you sell and who you sell it to, within a specific subsection of the population, the better.
Take this example for instance. Jeremy wants to start a business selling resume writing services. Seems like a great niche, right?
But it’s rather broad. Jeremy’s business is new and he doesn’t have much money to spend competing against all the million dollar resume writing services who can squash him in one blow. So how does Jeremy differentiate himself from the competition and draw customers to him?
He get’s much more specific.
Jeremy narrows down his niche, and decides he’ll to sell his resume writing services to recent college graduates.
Better, but that’s still rather broad, so Jeremy narrows his niche even more. He now decides he’ll sell his resume writing services to recent college graduates looking for Technical Writing jobs with software companies.
Jeremy went from:
Resume writing service ➡ Resume writing service for recent college graduates ➡ Resume writing services for recent college graduates looking for Technical Writing jobs with software companies.
See how that worked?
The more specific you are about what you sell and who your product or service is for, the better. It may seem like you’re reducing your chance of ever making money, but you’re actually increasing it.
Identifying a very specific niche for your business makes it much easier to tailor your product offering and marketing message to exactly what your audience wants and is willing to throw their money at you for. Make sense?
And don’t worry if you’re already in business, and you haven’t gotten very specific about your niche yet, all is not lost. It’s never too late to narrow your focus.
It’s probably not a good idea to shift to an altogether different niche in a totally new industry under your current business though. That would really confuse people.
So if you haven’t gotten specific about your niche, here’s your chance. Narrow down what you sell and who you sell it to, and then narrow it down again. As the saying goes,
it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond than a business trying to sell everything to everyone but actually selling nothing to no one.