Source: Pexels/burak the weekender.
Going up against the big players in any industry can be a daunting prospect for startups and small businesses, but there’s a secret to levelling the playing field: specialising. The more niche your business, the easier it is to redefine your unique selling proposition in a narrower field. It’s the magic of making yourself look like a bigger fish in a smaller pond.
Not every niche is lucrative enough to sustain a business, however. So how do you go about identifying gaps in the market that might be worth pursuing? Here are five boxes to tick when you’re on the precipice of launching an idea.
Finding your niche
Define the niche
Spotting a gap in the market is really about identifying unmet needs or finding under-served customers. This often comes from knowing the industry well and discovering an unsatisfied segment. Some of the more lucrative niches are in areas where bigger players cannot meet more complex customer needs because they either don’t have the specialist knowledge or haven’t set up their business to accommodate these types of clients.
For example, being in the mortgage game allowed me to see that self-employed applicants weren’t being well served by mainstream lenders. So I focused on developing and marketing products suited to that specific group, which meant we were no longer competing with banks because they didn’t have the capacity to maintain specialised documentation offerings. We were suddenly in a field with only a handful of other, much smaller, players which meant we could be competitive.
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