In 2010, Gillette blades dominated the market at 70 percent. Six years later, they were down to 54%. Phil Masiello is one of the reasons why Gillette is losing market share. Masiello founded 800razors.com, and sales at his company were about $2 million annually before selling it. However, Masiello is only one among many competitors. Harry’s dollar shave and other razor and blade companies are responsible for dropping in Gillette’s market share. It is Phil Masiello himself who has the best advice for Gillette. “Gillette makes a great shave,” Masiello said. “Nobody has ever complained about the great shave of Gillette and Schick. People only complained about the price. You take the price difference out, all of a sudden, they are back in the game. But the pricing problem is not new, and Masiello’s idea is not new. But how did he made a two million dollar niche out of nothing? He found out that there is no other affordable blade available in the market for people who wants to use it. In this article, we will go through three simple ways to find your niche market.
- Find a recurring problem
- Create a niche coaching offer
- Offer a Subset of products
Let’s go through the first part of the article.
Let’s find a recurring problem
Next time you visit a supermarket and go to the product sections, you can find products available for the same need. The brands and logos are different, but you cannot figure out why so many products are available for the same category when you look at a vague eye without blinking for a second. Almost all the products make a profit cut, and the companies are running successful and giving jobs to many. We never needed to have the confidence to create our niche after understanding what is happening around us. If you look a bit more profound way, all the products are different in a subcategory. Now, you can see every product is different from the others once again, you blink your eye and see it.
For example, if you want to buy chips, then it may look simpler every product says chips as their headline. But when you go deep, then there are salt chips, spicy chips, vinegar chips, sweet chips, crispy chips, dry fruit chips, animal flavor based chips, smell based chips. There are 100’s of chip variety stacked in front of us and tell us that looking down deep and finding subset creates hundreds of products, if not millions. Now since we have this level of confidence from this example, how to make our niche offerings? We will go through this in the second part of the article.
Create a niche coaching offer
As a startup, you may be struggling to find friendly niche upfront and be uncomfortable with it. It is often not easy to come up with your niche, and you are not alone. But it is the process, and the journey towards identifying the niche market is pleasurable than finding the niche itself. When you keep working, you will suddenly find that your niche market is in front of you and have not seen all the time. Often the companies that have grown big have found their niche this way as an accidental approach. A bit before finding this niche, they would have done many things: preparation work for finding the niche. As a shortcut method, you can come up with a niche when you look out for adjectives. Adjectives are compelling.
For example, If I want to create a startup strategy by just saying, “How to create a startup strategy,” it will be boring. But if I come up with an offer of saying “seven secret formula to create a startup strategy,” it seeks attention. Again if we go a bit in-depth and create “How to create a startup strategy with seven secret steps quickly in a day.” It would generate more curiosity. The more specifics you can come with, the more attention you seek and create a niche.
Offer a subset of products
Every day a human being creature (including myself) a minimum of sixty thousand thoughts per scientist’s data. So, If you want to seek your company’s attention competing with those sixty thousand thoughts, then good luck to you. Hence the big companies go for the radio, social media, and TV as their medium to seek attention and get celebrities to vouch for their products. That is the only way big companies can spend big money and sustain in their market. But as a startup, you and I don’t have the luxury to spend that big money in the market. So how do we solve the problem? Hence, when we come up with a subset of niche products. We create mini products to solve a client’s simple questions.
For example, If you are coming up with new soap, you explain the problem nurses have after a new baby is born as soon as the new baby is born, how the viruses can affect the newborn baby and how the nurse uses your soap to clean and attack the virus. A nurse displaying your soap with an infant baby targeted sufficiently for young parents as well. You are positioning a niche, but you can create a subset of applications that solves your problem. Then you can create a specific pamphlet for schools to have the soap for your soap. You can also create a prepregnancy education related to the virus and take care of virus-free newborn kids. The subgroup of offering is infinite once you have your niche available, and you work hard with your place and satisfy their problem. Now you can say, what is a big deal? You have enough money, and you are thinking about not focusing on a niche market.
Summary
Often as a startup, we are overwhelming in finding our market and create a successful business. But we can come out of this the moment we follow the same path as big corporates which offer the same chips with different flavours. We have covered finding the recurring problem, creating niche coaching offer using adjectives, and creating a subset of offers with a newborn baby example. Go ahead, find your niche, and focus on the remarkable startup journey.
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