Younger entrepreneurs, listen up. You’ll spend a lot of time watching social media videos about how to make it in entrepreneurship. You’ll hear the latest trends, the newest business ideas, and the grind mentality. There are some good elements to each of theses, but then it starts getting into buying courses on how to be an entrepreneur. Eventually, it’s going to get exhausting and you’ll burn out. It’s good to organize your business life and map out what you want, but you have to take massive action. There are two (2) things that you’ll actually want to do.
- Master an industry/niche.
- Intersect two industries/niches.
Let’s break these down a little bit.
Master an industry/niche.
This can’t be underscored enough. It’s a major pre-requisite that you want to focus on. Learn everything that you can about one specific niche. Become a master of it. Do market research. Understand the customer’s pain points. Know why people buy. What are your competitors doing? Pick out the technical aspects about the niche.
Many, not all, of the businesses that come to play are from the people that worked in a specific niche as an employee for a number of years. They learned the ins-and-outs of the industry. Accumulated as much knowledge as possible. Understood the depth of the customer’s concerns. Once they had this experience, they started their own business in the same industry, and focused on addressing those pain points.
Intersect two industries/niches.
But what do you do if the industry or niche that you are particularly knowledgeable of is in a “red ocean”? Write out what you excel at or what piques your interest. It doesn’t matter if they are all over the place. Then, pinpoint an intersection between two or three of the niches. For instance, if you are good at social media marketing (highly competitive) and are also interested in beauty products. What can you do? Don’t just make a general social media marketing agency, niche down to a social media marketing agency specifically tailored towards beauty products.
Think about this. What are you innately curious about that drives you to learn more and more about it? What is that thing that itches at you? You don’t have to necessarily neglect your health and family to build it, but think about it. What did Apple do when they created the iPhone? They simply combined a mobile phone with an audio player. At the time, it was a matter of taking two devices from separate industries and intersecting them to free up pocket space. It’s not some wildly unbelievable idea. It connected two products. That’s what innovation is. Small, intuitive improvements.
Your goal
Create something that provides more value to the customer than the price. There isn’t a one-size-fits all framework, it varies from segment to segment. But, the key is in unlocking and understanding that niche better than anyone else. Yes, there are a number of very good products and services that fall through the cracks and go unnoticed because better financed and better marketed products and services push their way to the top. Overall, though, masters find their way to the top, intersections find their way to the top.