Selecting the niche market for your startup is key. One aspect of this was addressed in John Gale’s post Target Market for Your Startup
This post describes a complementary process. So let’s assume that you have chosen your niche market. Here are several additional factors to consider:
- Perform a detailed analysis of your product. A key component of this analysis is defining the vertical markets that the product will appeal to.
- Do some research here. There are government databases you can use for the United States and for the EU. Unfortunately other countries outside the British Commonwealth have less complete data.
- For which functional areas in which vertical markets will use of your product be Mission Critical to their business? Be as precise/specific as possible
- Make a list of appropriate keywords
- Use Google to determine how many sites you find when you search for a keyword. By the way, you really need to use the search engine that you care about, presumably Google. Searching with DuckDuckGoGo will likely yield different results. And most people use Google.
- Use a site such as Word Tracker or Overture (now owned by Yahoo) to determine how many users are looking for each keyword; thus estimating the interest and competition. The Google Adwords keyword tool is another tool for this task. Wordstream.com, serps.com, semrush.com, keyworddiscovery.com, keywordeye.com and keywordspy.com are somewhat similar tools.
- So this may be a good niche market for you.
- Consider using the name of the niche market in a domain name or Website tagline.
A different approach is to look only at your competitive websites’ Develop your Website with strong differentiation and positioning
The traditional advice is to find a niche with numerous customers and few competitors selling to it. With careful positioning and differentiation and intellectual property this is very doable.
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