✴️ #28 - Find Your Niche.

Author

Ben Jang
December 15, 2024 

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✏️ Summary

  • Riches are in the niches

  • Life gets easier with a smaller niche

  • A good niche cuts through the competition

Last week, I spoke to a friend in distress (let's call him J). He started his marketing agency 2 months ago, and was frustrated at his rate of progress. While talking through his next steps, we found a lesson I want to repeat just in case it's useful for you:

You have to niche down.

J had been targeting 'consultancies' as a niche. He found himself stretched thin, learning about new industries just to make proposals, talking to people around the world who had different business practices. In short, he was getting niche-slapped.

Let's go through his list of problems:

  • Not enough time to give customized proposals

  • Not enough specific industry knowledge to offer genuine guidance

  • Not enough testimonials to offer relevant industry proof

  • Difficulty selling generic offer to clients looking for specific solutions

Do any of them sound familiar? If you're in the agency niche, you might recognize some of them. By adopting a specific niche, what might happen?

  • Easy to operationalize proposals (everyone has the same problems!)

  • Compounding specific knowledge and value-add for industry

  • Relevant testimonials that can lead to new business

  • Ability to pinpoint specific solutions for specific problems

See the difference?

Airbnb sells holidays to everyone, but they started with designers. Facebook connects everyone, but they started with college kids. You have to start with a niche - and the smaller it is, the better.

I got my first client 2 weeks after I decided to work with:

  • UK students

  • With a business

  • Applying to US colleges

  • In the next 3 years.

That's a sub-sub-sub-sub-niche. There were probably only a handful of people in that group - full stop. But if they were in that group, my goodness, I was their man.

Picking a good niche is like building a spear rather than a club. Instead of a dull mass, you build a sharp tip that cuts through the competition. It's so much easier to get your first customers by focusing on a single message.

🔗 Progress Update

I’m learning the niche lesson, again.

I hate relearning lessons, but I seem to be doing it, yet again.

WordRobin has values I will stick with. One of them is that it will never be a tool that rewrites for you. Always feedback, never rewriting.

But it’s not enough. The messaging is far too general. I am now experimenting with something I know - college admissions.

For those of you that are not familiar, it’s US college application season. Students and college consultants around the world are scrambling to get their essays finished.

I’ll be running some traffic to this page to see how people react to the messaging!

What’s Next?

Right now I’m building in the ability to make your dream reader profiles public, and download presets from others. It’s going to be interesting to see what ends up being popular!

That’s all for now!

Enjoy the newsletter? Please forward to a pal. It only takes 18 seconds. Making this one took 2.5 hours.

Ben | X