Tres Spicher's blog

Finding a Market: Do your homework! Look for specific business niche ideas.

One of the early things I learned while getting started is that it’s important to find your niche and do your market research before diving into building a product. Rob Walling’s book Start Small, Stay Small was a big impetus for my shift in attention to finding business niche ideas. I’ll review his book in a later post. After initially starting to build a product I eventually determined that nobody would want (more on that later), I shifted my attention to first find a needy marketplace, and then to building out a product. This has several advantages:

1. It gives me focus. When I’m in the middle of hammering out fixes to some really tedious programming bugs in order to make my “fun project” production-worthy, it’s nice to have some kind of motivation. Knowing there’s a market and demand waiting for me at the other end of that gives me that motivation.
2. It saves me time. The biggest resource I’m bringing to my new business is my portfolio of software skills. If I waste a ton of time on a product that has no market, that’s my company’s value getting flushed down the toilet. The job I’m leaving right now billed clients a lot of money for my time, and I was consistently in demand. Of course, I didn’t bring home anywhere near as much as my clients got billed. Still, it does tell me that my time has to be worth at least that much to the clients, otherwise they’d go out of business. The reason it’s worth it to them? Because they already have buyers.
3. It’s the only way to make money. Let’s face it, personal programming tasks are fun, but I would really like to eventually turn this into my full-time income. You need customers in order to do that.

OK, but how do I find a market?

The Google AdWords: Keyword Tool is a great place to start. I start plugging in anything that pops into my head. Do a sort by ‘Global Monthly Searches’. I think that items in the 5000-15000 monthly search range are a good place to start. Any more than that, and it’s likely to be impossible to rank for the search term. Any lower, and you’re not getting volume. Don’t stress about “all the good ones being taken” — that’s irrelevant while the internet is still rapidly growing. As quickly as good niches are getting taken, new ones are appearing.

Market Samurai is another great option (disclaimer: the preceding link is an affiliate link, and if you click it and end up signing up, you’ll be buying me a beer, so if you don’t like what you read here, and you don’t want me to have beer, don’t click it). It offers a 40 day trial and I’ve been pretty impressed with what it’s able to do. I’ll go into more detail on my workflow with Market Samurai in a later post, but the basic idea is this:

• Think of keyword that’s a good balance between broad and specific (too broad: nutrition, too specific: electrolyte metabolism rate, just right: sports nutrition)
• Use a keyword generation tool to find related terms
• Filter based on various selection criteria (competition, search volume, relatedness)
• Rinse and repeat until you find something that looks like a product demand.