Is it possible to be "too niche"?

I actually think being "too niche' to start out plays into your benefit. There's so much competition out there that niching down to hyper-specific targets will benefit you. If there's enough targets in the niche to support the saas, great, if not, you can always branch out horizontally

I have started a few projects that have been too niche. Firstly, it was hard to reach my prospective customers. And when I did, the audience was so small that converting even 5% of them wouldn't create a big enough company.

So if you have a good idea of how to reach your niche audience, that's a good start. Then figuring out how niche it is, so you don't make my mistake.

I have experienced this before, in similar circumstances in the past, particularly in dealing with funding providers. When considering business proposals for possible untapped markets, they often used the expression: “There may be a gap in the market, but is there a market in the gap?” In other words, “Can your idea make enough money to satisfy all stakeholders, including yourself?”.

But, if you enjoy the niche, and you are happy with whatever income it generates, and you have no particular desire to expand hugely, then just carry on enjoying it!

When you feel you’ve reached the maximum size of businesses you want Be Inclusive to be, you could consider whether you can either run that business in a passive way, or sell the business, or have someone else run it on a part-time basis, while you explore possible new niches to work on.

It definitely yes. My product is a tool to send web articles and newsletters to Kindle (https://ktool.io). It’s too niche that it’s quite hard to acquire new paying customers.

I was aware of this since the beginning but was too busy to take action.

Going to pivot soon to broaden the target customer

Firstup, your LP is fantastic! Adding to myCollection.
Typically in a niche business, you master a very particular process for a set group of people. That does not mean you only ever have to master that 1 process. Most niche processes can be replicated out.

That is in fact how CRM grew from basic lead generation thru to opportunity management and the full CRM, then duplicated that and popped it into B2B context.

so for me, at the. mo, focus on mastering the niche process.

Get it sooo slick, people looove to use it. Like Apple standard of beauty and elegance.
Cant emphasis how critical usability and enjoyment is when dealing with a tedious process. The best apps I have seen in this domain, make it so the users dont have to capture anything, just point and click their iphone/android for evidence capture.

Once it is that slick, the citizens experienced to be 'that easy'... citizens will find ways to use your so-called niche process in other ways. Citizens in my experience can't stand anything tedious and when they realise benefit using your app, it wont take them long, to go.. hey.. we could also use it here (sure there will be some tweaks to adapt, but not many).

I hope this makes sense.

I'm actually intentionally going "too niche" with my first product. Not sure if it's going to work, but my thought is to use it as a wedge to acquire my first ~100 or so customers before expanding the feature set and going more broad.

In my view being "too niche" is beneficial when there is so much saturation & Duplicted Software Features.
On the Flip Side, It is difficult to generate sufficient interest & sales to sustain a business. Finding the right balance between a product that addresses a specialized market & appeals to a larger audience is difficult.

Yes, it is possible to be too niche. If you focus on a very small group of people with a specialized need, you may find it difficult to generate enough interest and sales to sustain your business. It's important to identify the right balance between a product that is specific enough to meet the needs of a particular market, while still being broad enough to appeal to a large enough audience. Doing some market research can help you determine the size of the potential market and if your product will be viable in that market. Additionally, make sure you are staying up-to-date with emerging trends and technologies so you can adjust your product accordingly.

I don't think so

Nikita Bier has a good tweet that says:
"The only way to push through the noise of the App Store is to be unapologetic about marketing to your first users. If your first users are Berkeley students, go ahead & call the app Berkeley Memes. It's hard enough to get the flywheel spinning without being obnoxiously relevant."

I like what you're offering and you're genuine in helping your market solve a problem; so no, I don't think being too niche is a problem. Besides, you can always expand your services in the future, especially after feedback from clients.

Perhaps you can re-use that tech / UX design and domain knowledge and apply it to something that is closely related to it. This way you can re-use most of what you have and grow your potential audience that way.

Well, it is about the TAM(total addressable market). Too niche is never a problem, but the market size is. Let's say, you build a chrome extension that helps indiehackers filter posts. Now it is as niche as it can be, but the community is a growing one. With that you can find the number of people you can serve to. With that you make an assumption that how much share of the market you can take and how much money that can make you. If that money is a profit that you desire, then "too niche" it great. Having said that, you can expand you market by spreading awareness.

Being "too niche" in business has both pros and cons. On the positive side, specializing in a specific market allows for tailored products/services and reduced competition. However, downsides include limited market size, dependency on a narrow segment, and potential scalability issues. Perhaps broaden the niche as your company grow?

It depends a bit on your goals.
I think especially for indiehackers the smaller the niche the easier it gets but obviously you'll hit limits in terms of earning potential and outside investment.

Having said that from your description your market doesn't sound all that niche at all tbh.
What makes you think you are "too niche"?

"Freelancers" and "small agencies" is actually NOT niche enough. "Managing accessibility audits" does seem to be somewhat MVP, although I'd need to actually see it to "audit" it myself. From the sounds of it, you may not be experiencing growth in terms of numbers or revenue. If that's the issue, you'd really need to conduct research to understand "What problem does managing accessibility audits really solve?" Once you have your core problem defined, you'd next need to take a look at what industry is either needing it the most and ignorant, or already actively buying accessibility audits? (Blue vs Red ocean.) B2B is the fastest to revenue, but you've chosen the businesses with the least amount of profit margin. Finding one behemoth in an un-catered-to industry, or that spends quite a lot of time and money on accessibility audits would immediately turn the tide for you. Just 3 enterprise clients paying you $10K ea per month subscription would be $30K MRR. This gives you the overhead to scale and grow your business. Thereafter, you can create a smaller, cheaper offering catering to the freelancers, and small agencies. You can never be too niche, and in your case it sounds like your NOT niche enough. Pick an industry, pick a problem, pick a bigger client. Then scale. Cheers!

I think there's a high chance that once a niche starts working, it starts spreading making it no longer a niche. I think the chances are low for a good niche to stay a niche, or niches to be "too niche" - I think this means the product will burn out in a couple of years.

DISCLAIMER: just my thoughts!

"Too niche" can mean a few things:

• There may be people who love your product, but no reliable place where those people gather that you can tell them about your product. IMO, the fellow in the comments making a product that sends web articles and newsletters to Kindle falls into this category: even if find a way to find just readers or Kindle users, only a small slice would find that product useful. I'll call this "unreachable customers".

• Your product works great for an easily findable slice of people, but there aren't really any "adjacent" groups that it would also work well. The overall addressable market just isn't large enough for what you built to support a business. When I was younger, I built a super useful tool for an online game... with 20 players. I would never try to turn that into a business. I'd call this "too small of a TAM (total addressable market)".

The ideal is that you target a very small niche, build a great product for it, and then find adjacent niches that your product also works for. That's a much easier way to earn a large market than approaching it head-on.

Yes, but that's not a bad thing. Finding the right sized niche is hard (and I'm still learning by trial and error), but if you have some customers and feel your niche is too small, to me that's a good signal to try expanding the scope a bit.

I think I heard Adrian from PyImageSearch talking about this on his recent podcast. He focused on a really specific Python library (if I remember correctly), got a bit of traction but not much, and then branched out into other Python image-related stuff and that took off. To me, that seems easier than starting too broadly and not knowing where to focus.

Having said that, maybe there are other ways of gaining traction for you. I certainly wouldn't try to reduce your pricing (if anything, increase it!), but if you have some power user customers then a couple of suggestions are:

• Try to figure out where they came from (ask them directly if necessary), and then focus on that source to look for new customers, e.g. LinkedIn, accessibility conferences, etc.
• Try to figure out what they particularly like about your service, and use their phrasing in your marketing. E.g. "it's like someone does the paperwork for me", "it takes the stress out of compliance", "it's my must-have for accessibility audits", "it's an ally for a11y" (heh, you can have that one for free!)
• The accessibility community is tight-knit, so those power users must have good contacts. Add an incentive to spread via word of mouth – not necessarily a full affiliate scheme but something like refer a new customer and get two months free.

Possible, but the more niche you become, the more money you have to charge for the product.

It can be too small, if it's so small the number of potential customers is only in the double digits and the value of the product isn't in the five to six digit range.

Beyond that, I think it depends on your goals?

If you're trying for a side income, and the project doesn't require a huge investment, then a relatively small niche could make sense.

It's all about cost/benefit analysis, right? If it costs a lot of money to build the product and the return is too low, then you will likely lose money. If it only costs you time to build the product, and the return is low but consistent over time, then you've built an income stream.

If you're looking to go big, though, then you really need to carefully choose your niche and ensure it's large enough to support your goals.

Your example seems potentially problematic though. I'm a freelancer who has worked on a decent number of startup sites, and I've never been asked to do anything at all about accessibility. My thought is that very few startups think about accessibility in their initial product design. It's not a part of an MVP; it's what you do once you've gotten traction. Maybe agencies would see more requests for accessibility?

But a tool to help manage the audits? I've seen a lot of tools that will perform an audit, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around what managing the audit would even look like or how it would help me. I mean, why wouldn't I just use a tool to validate the site and add any problems the tool identifies to my normal task tracking list? Or better, just keep running the tool and use the list of problems in the tool as my to-do list? There are a ton of free tools, after all.

So considering I would be a potential customer if I had a client ask me to ensure a site was accessible, at least your description, phrased in that manner, doesn't sound like something I would need. Maybe you have a better elevator pitch that you didn't employ above?

But if I'm right, then your niche isn't just small as much as nearly nonexistent. And you do need to have some customers.

I like that you narrowed down your niche; that's actually pretty hard to do, at least for me. But I think you might have a difficult sell for that product.

I am currently struggling with this concept myself. We built an end-to-end encrypted data storage network that uses a Cosmos blockchain for user permissions and making sure our storage providers continue to have all the data. Its called Jackal: https://jackalprotocol.com/

We live and die by the unique TBs that will be stored on this network.

We are still pre-product, but our options are;

1. Continue to double down on the Web3 niche that would use Jackal as an active cloud storage environment with their crypto wallets. These users enjoy the values of self-custodial storage, ownership, self-sovereignty, geo-redundancy, and other classic crypto ideologies.

2. Generalize into an auxiliary data backup for disaster recovery with the Web2 markets. They want a custodial solution without the crypto wallet UX, email and password login, fiat currency payments, and other values that oppose the web3 peeps.

3. Do both and risk spreading our marketing and engineering efforts too thin with 18 months of runway left.

Would love to hear what everyone thinks.

Sure. If the need is so overtly specific, then it's possible. If you're catering to a group (freelances and small agencies), then it seems likely there is enough of an audience. Every focused need beyond that is going to make it less accessible.

It sure is, if you have relatively big costs and a very niche product it's going to be hard to profitable.

I am facing the same problem. We are developing a file version control software for mechanical engineers, and on the one hand it is actually harder to develop than git, but on the other hand it turns out that the group of engineers who can accept the git concept is perhaps smaller. So it's hard to break even financially when doing commercialization. When the potential user group is relatively small, too expensive people are not willing to buy, too cheap and especially low revenue.

Going very niche is great for learning and another source of income but you will plateau very quickly.

I think that starting from a niche is good practice because it gives confidence and feedbacks. However, once you realize that a niche is too limited for growth, you should definitely pivot.

Starting with a small niche is often key to getting off the ground. It allows you to refine your offering and build a loyal customer base. From this strong foundation, you can gradually expand to other niches.

There are 8 billion people in the world. If you can build something that just one in a hundred thousand people want (that's pretty niche--just 22 people in my hometown of Houston) and charge $10/month for it, that's nearly a million a year in revenue.

Accessiblity is a niche space and it works out well for you as companies are starting to be more inclusive. My company finally appointed a head of accessiblity to get a top down directive on accessiblity and inclusivity.

I guess how niche you can go also depends on which sector you are in. Like for us, @fastsociety and I are building in the AI space which is so broad and emerging every day. We have kept our scope pretty broad and we are trying to narrow down our niche based on user feedback.

Great questions!

I've struggled with this before as I built my first venture (IWL Translate). At some point, we were using something like 37 demographic and psychographic parameters to segment our audience to the point that we only had around 150 accounts that fit our criteria.

Ultimately, the key driver of any decision was the profitability of the venture.

Aside from exploring cost optimization plays, I also looked into whether I could find some upsell or cross-sell opportunities to increase the average buy per customer. This way, we could leverage our existing customer relations and increase our total revenues with 0 marketing spend.

In our case, after building a financial model with few scenarios, we decided to stay niche, leveraged some upselling opportunities and managed to increase the average customer spend by 150% in 6 months.

Looking back at this experience, I'm very happy with how things turned out for us. However, if I'd find myself in the same situation today after +9 years of venture building, I'd make two minor adjustments to my decision-making formula:

• I'd put a higher weight on the amount of my time needed to run and maintain the whole thing AND
• I'd reflect on the question: does this business still allow me to do something I truly enjoy?

If, after all the calculations and introspection, it turns out that the business is sustainable, runs with very little intervention from me and allows me to do something I like, I'd keep it going.

Not every business can or needs to be a gazillion-dollar mammoth. As long as it is an economic and emotional value-add in your life, why shut it down?

P.S. Your product really looks great! I was not even aware of the existence of accessibility audits. Thanks for introducing me to this ✌️

Presumably being in a niche is only a problem if you can't grow existing accounts or find enough users.

But, just because you started in a niche does not mean you must stay that way.

Use the niche need to spearhead into specific, additional users and then grow the product scope based on the next logical thing they will need (and without ruining your core service)

If you have a dedicated customer base you're miles ahead already.

Anybody can be too niche but what will also be too niche is your revenue. Then one way to increase revenue when you're very niche is to dominate that niche be an expert at it increase the value/offerings and own that market which is easier that owning a market that's very packed with the big boys.

While it can certainly help to be great at a specific thing, you put yourself at risk. Being too niche means that you won't have room to pivot into something related or similar, should there be any economic changes impacting your target audience. Or a new law, regulation, new tech.

It's definitely possible to be "too niche," but it's important to remember that niche products can still be successful. The key is finding the right balance between being niche enough to attract a specific audience and having a large enough audience to sustain a business. It sounds like you have a loyal user base and are happy with your progress, so it may not be necessary to broaden your target audience. However, it may be worth exploring other ways to monetize or expand your offering within your niche market. Ultimately, it's up to you to weigh the pros and cons and make the best decision for your business.

Hey Steve, I think it would help to start with that very small niche and then see if you want to scale later. If you are already ready with this audience then it doesn't matter right now how big or small the niche is.

While it's essential to find your target audience, it's also important to consider the potential size of that audience.

Targeting a specific niche can have its advantages. For example, a small but dedicated group of power users can provide valuable feedback and help shape the app's direction. Additionally, a niche market can be less crowded, making it easier to stand out from the competition.

However, it's also essential to consider the market's potential growth. For example, if the need for accessibility audits is not growing, it may be challenging to develop your app. It's also important to consider if there are other potential markets or use cases for your app that could expand your target audience. With my website that provides complete design services, I cater to a specific niche of people looking for such services.

Ultimately, it's a balance between finding a niche that is small enough to be manageable but large enough to sustain your business. Evaluating if your place needs to be bigger and if there are other opportunities to expand your target audience is always worth considering.

This is my product.. you can check it out here: https://www.bubblewrap.design/ For better understanding..