Find your niche and go for it

Start with a narrow niche if you have a big idea and limited resources to bring it to life. In this 2011 video, I talk about an American friend who wanted to create an online business about dogs.

Start with a narrow niche rather than everyone at once

The idea was to gather information about dogs, pedigrees and breeders. I could see something interesting in helping a family learn more before choosing a dog.

But the plan was very broad. Lots of information on many breeds needed gathering, while the right people also had to find and use the website.

My friend didn’t have a big marketing budget. So I was more worried about the scope than the basic idea behind the business.

What if you started with one breed?

I suggested choosing poodles, for example. Then it became clearer which people you needed to reach, what information you needed and where to find your target group.

You could research relevant blogs, magazines and keywords, and talk to people already interested in the breed. Those were examples of making the effort more targeted.

Expand once you’ve got something working

If you became good within the first niche, you could later go deeper with more products or expand to another breed or country.

It wasn’t a guarantee the idea would succeed. But I thought it had a better chance with a scope that matched the resources available.

If a business is slow, the answer isn’t always to broaden it further. Perhaps you need to narrow the target group and get even better at helping those particular people.

Also read about seeing your business from the outside.

A restaurant visit with American friends

It had been a week since my last video. I’d been busy with all sorts of things, but that day I’d also taken it a little easy. I’d spoken with journalists, wished my father a happy birthday and sat in a restaurant with good American friends.

One was a self-employed building contractor who restored houses. Now he wanted to start something new online. It struck me how much American and Danish entrepreneurs resembled one another when starting a new business.

I said I perhaps advised around five hundred entrepreneurs a week online. Much of what I told them was the same: A big market didn’t in itself make an idea easy to get working.

A database of dogs and their backgrounds

My friend Bruce liked dogs. His idea was a website where you could trace dogs’ backgrounds. When a dog had puppies, you should be able to see their parents, whether they were a particular breed or a mix, and what their pedigree looked like.

He also talked about bad breeders who didn’t treat dogs properly. I didn’t know about that myself. But I could see possible value in getting better information before buying a puppy.

If I were buying a dog, I’d want to research the breeder, read reviews and see what others knew about how the dogs were treated and their health. I said I could imagine paying for that access.

At the time, I used an example of a dog in the USA easily costing two thousand dollars. That was my assessment in the 2011 video. And money wasn’t the whole problem. If the family discovered after six months that something was wrong with the dog, everyone would already be attached to it. Then it hurt in other ways too.

You just had to register all the dogs

I didn’t know which competing solutions already existed. But I wasn’t dismissing the business idea. Perhaps users could pay for access. Perhaps advertising could fund it.

What I didn’t like was the scope. There were many breeds, and the plan was to collect lots of information in the database. Here came the familiar just-have-to effect: The website was built, so now you just had to register all the dogs in the USA.

Of course it didn’t literally have to be every dog. But it was still a huge number. And how was he going to market it?

Bruce pointed at our friend Craig and said he’d help. Craig went pale. He was a capable guy, but how could he handle that task when Bruce had no money for it? I thought it was unrealistic.

It was the same thing I saw again and again among Danish entrepreneurs: They wanted to conquer the whole world in half the time.

Poodles first, then you could choose the next step

I suggested starting with a single breed. Let’s say poodles. Once he had the pedigrees in place and knew that part of the market, he could then choose how to grow.

One option was to go deeper into the niche and sell poodle accessories. I mentioned little poodle waistcoats as an example. Another option was taking the same poodle knowledge to more countries.

A third option was getting to grips with another breed, such as German shepherds, once the poodles were working. But first he needed to become really good at the initial area.

I compared it with the discussions on BilligVVS’s board: Should we take plumbing supplies into more countries, or start selling lamps and kitchens in Denmark, for example? That was the kind of choice between expanding the market and expanding the range I was thinking of.

A defined target group made marketing concrete

Starting with poodles, he could contact people with poodle blogs, write posts and explain the idea. He could do PR and buy adverts in poodle magazines. I said magazines like that actually existed in the USA.

He could also buy AdWords and work on search engine optimisation around poodles, different kinds of poodle and the words the target group used. And he could engage people with competitions for the cutest, biggest or smallest poodle.

Suddenly it was a defined niche with specific people and places to start. Bruce asked if I believed in his idea, then. I replied that if he chose one breed and went all out, I actually thought he had a chance. You’ll find more of my experiences of reaching customers online in E-pusher.

If he wanted to do it for every breed at once, I didn’t believe in it with the resources he had. I compared it to a huge slice of bread and a little blob of butter. There wasn’t enough butter to cover the whole slice.

A slow business might need a narrower focus

My encouragement was also aimed at those already up and running. If business was slow, expanding into more things might seem logical. But perhaps you needed to do the opposite.

Perhaps you needed to narrow it down even more and really focus on a smaller niche. Then you could become better at serving that particular target group.

That was also where I often thought you could earn more per hour or per product. You could be much more to a narrow target group than if you wanted to make something for everyone.

I’d probably said it before in a video, but now you got the point again. Have a great weekend.

De bedste hilsner

Martin