🔎 Find Your Audience, People, Tribe: How do you find your target customer? 🥾

You hear the phase “niche down”, or “find your tribe” all the time thrown around in bootstrapping business circles, I’ve even written an article on how to have your audience help you find your business idea, but how do you find your audience when you looking for a niche to sell to?

✌️ What is a niche?

According to Arvid Kahl from the book Zero to Sold, our current book study.

A niche is a smaller subset of a much larger population, see larger companies such as Chewy might spend money to market to all dog owners, however the bootstrapped founder might niche this down and only market to people who own Italian Grey Hounds. A much smaller subset of the larger dog owner population. So in the case of our example a niche is just a smaller subset of the population that have a deep shared common thread we can latch onto.

❄️ Why is a niche unique?

Its simple, a niche is almost like a tribe they are very homogenous they tend to think the same when it comes to the problem you are solving for them. In the case of our Italian Grey Hound owners they might all have issues with dog cloths fitting their dogs neck appropriately. This critical problem creates an opportunity for a entrepreneur to come and assimilate into the tribe looking for the critical problems as they arise.

🤔 Niches have thought leaders?

Because niches are normally organized tribally you will need to find the leaders of the community and use them to help market your product, by solving their problems, or you can become the thought leader of the group. You can also find build relationships with reporters, or bloggers who cover your niche, an idea posed by the book Traction. You will read, comment, offer advice. You will work to become the thought leader and provide real value to the tribe.

The above quote is just a fancy way to say “Build your niche” & “Build your community”.

🤑 The business opportunity of a niche!

Because the niche we found is targeted, large enough to support our business, but small enough to not attract competition we have opened up a business opportunity that will provide us with…

Low-Cost Marketing

Our niche is tribal and speaks the same language so we can gear of landing pages and marketing directly to them. We can speak their language this means creating content will be much easier and have less competition.

We also might see opportunities for for lower CPC & cheaper partnerships as their are less competition bidding up the cost. However if you have been able to be the thought leader of a niche community the marketing will be done for you!

Referral System

Sharing of our product might be built in directly and our plan here is that our community shares our product b/c it solves the common pain point, in the case of Arvid’s FeedbackPanda it only took one social media comment and 2 short years later he was doing 50K MRR.

👆Listen to your target customer 👆

👏 Standard’s for your niche!

When looking for a niche you need to keep a few things in mind, this allows you to build a high quality engaged tribe.

• Build and empower your thought leaders.

• Set high standards for content from the start.

• Build off an existing audience.

The above standards when taken to building our niche or community provide a highly engaged audience that is inspired due to solving their problem and is highly engaged to share the solution, in the above case of our Italian Grey Hounds they share b/c the dogs no longer have cold necks in the winter and they love that.

🎁 Wrap Up

Niche building is our strategy to building a successful bootstrapped business. Its the high level plan that we need to layout in order to find our customers, understand their problems, solve their problems, and market the solution. However its important to understand that this isn’t the tactics we will use those are the day to day actions.