The topic of having your niche is probably as old as marketing but many individuals and businesses still find it difficult to recognize their target audience and develop products to meet their needs. So how do you craft a niche in a crowded space? How do you define a niche in an emerging market? How do you obtain that peculiar oomph that sets you apart from the crowd? Well…

You don’t need a niche!
Stay with me on this one 😁. The concept of having a niche is focusing on a subset of a general population, specializing on a narrow product offering, or identifying an untapped value. What is more specific, narrow, unique, or special than you?

You are your niche!
You are your first customer! This is definitely not true for all applications but in cases where you’re stuck on finding a niche, it’s most often true. Start out from the needs you identify, solve those problems for yourself then people who have similar problems will be attracted to your solution. A lot of the tech founders follow this trend, they build a product that meets their need. Mark Zukerberg did it with Facebook, Timi Ajiboye did it with Buycoins, and you might want to do it for your next idea.

Don’t get stuck!
The other option is to identify a group of people you’d like to solve problems for. A nursing mother may think of a better way to bathe a one month old baby, a hairdresser may think of better hair products for a dreadlocks customer. Sadly a lot of brands get stuck on trying to define their ideal customer. There are so many layers of research, profiling, and data to define the ‘target audience’ that goals get lost in the process.

I experienced a similar problem with my blog. I have so many interests from anime to data analytics to national development that I didn’t know which topic to focus on for my posts. Who’s going to read “top 10 anime in 2020” one week and “Best UI/UX practices” the next? Well I would 😁

While reviewing my year at the end of 2019 I realized that I had written only one blog post throughout the year and it was such a refreshing read that I wished I had written and posted more. When I’m reviewing my 2020, I’d have more content to reflect on…the first person I needed to write for was me.

Create the type of music you’d like to listen to, write the type of book you’d like to read, build the type of product you’d like to use. If there’s an idea you’ve been putting off because you aren’t sure about the target audience, be the target audience, start with you and build from there.