Fibery is like the penultimate example of not starting with a niche, which makes this article quite funny. They are the anti-niche, and further, defining a niche as focusing on a specific size of company is also an inversion of what most would call a niche...<p>They had a unique opportunity here to write an article “don’t start with a niche”, but I don’t know if they have the success yet to prove it.
Hasn't this ground already been covered in <i>Crossing the Chasm</i>[1]? I.e. that in order to move your marketing from early adopters to the early majority pragmatists you need to build an integrated solution for a specific problem. E.g. the Mac and desktop publishing.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm</a>
I enjoyed looking for niches in the VR industry previously, coming up with several prototypes and probing for users through Reddit DMs. Was able to get some starting sales that way.<p>I'm doing it for language learning, with the niche of couples, with myself as a user included. I re-read Crossing the Chasm a lot which covers starting with a beachhead, gathering your troops, and planning D-Day onto the market.
I agree with “Start with a niche”, but pretty much all of the examples given aren’t niche products..,, they were some of the most revolutionary products in history. I’m just saying they don’t really illustrate the concept of a “niche start”.
> Radio (1895)<p>> VisiCalc (Excel predecessor, 1979)<p>> Facebook (2004)<p>This is an... interesting version of technological innovation history.
This article makes me feel misled. Doesn't niche as applied here apply to everything from the wheel to soap?<p>Fake examples:
The general needed a wheel to move his cargo, so when he had the wheel invented, now the wheel was from an army niche.
The king didn't want poop on his hands like a pleb, so he got someone to invent soap for him. Boom, the soap came from the niche of kings. Someone who needed to walk far, invented shoes. Boom, the niche for shoes was far walkers.
So, I like the idea and I'm starting with a Niche: board games! Yes, that's right, it's me pimping my programming language for board games which I really need to work on more<p><a href="http://www.adama-lang.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.adama-lang.org/</a><p>I see a lot of potential outside of my space since I'm operating at the level of a document + atomic transactions + workflow, so I may have something more broadly applicable. However, the burden rests with me to paint the picture for how that could work.
All of the tech mentioned are broadly in the same domain - connecting people together or connecting people with information. This domain has saturated now. In fact there are no more niche areas untouched. All innovation now is about quality and economy. It just boils down to biggest bang for the buck.