Niche down hard

It seems like one of the hardest things for entrepreneurs to do is to focus their target market. Most entrepreneurs seem to want to focus on the mass market and have everybody as their target market.

In most cases however, you don’t need everybody as customers, and you will also find out, that customers have very different needs and tastes.

An alternative strategy is to really niche down you market and focus on a very narrow niche and develop a solution that fits this very specific niche. This will make you an expert in a  very specific niche, and you will be able to have a very loyal customer group that is big enough for you, but too small for a big company to fokus on.

Filed under: ideas, customer, ideas, niche, segments, user

Are you a lead user?

Being a lead user of a product is a good basis for stating a business – or at least for developing the business idea.

If you are a very enthusiastic user of a type of products – and especially if you are an upfront lead user – you have an understanding of the problems and frustrations that users face. And if you are a lead user, you will know the problems that less advanced users will face in the future.

If you were one of the first people to buy an iPad or a Kindle-reader, you might already have a lot of experience in how people will be using tablets and what they are not suited for.

So where do you already have user experience that the majority of people will only have in years from now? Or where do you just have enough user and customer experience to really understand the frustrations of customers.

Filed under: ideas, customer, ideas, problem, user