Niches gone big.
“You have to find a niche.”
You might have gotten this piece of advice when you’re starting your first business.
But you might also dislike the idea of finding a niche. You looked around at the people who achieved massive success, and they are all doing something mainstream.
After all, you have ambitions of bathing in billions of dollars while others hate on you. How’s a niche going to help you get there?
Have you ever considered how did something become mainstream in the first place?
Answer: Everything mainstream grew from small niches.
A niche becomes mainstream because the pioneers generated enough success, and that success brought in more people who wanted to have a piece of the pie.
Make sense doesn’t it?
Here are three mainstream products and industries that were niches only a few decades ago:
1. Youtubers
A teenager posting videos of himself in a dark bedroom blabbering nonsense. Who’d have thought it would spawn a whole industry?
When Youtube first started, no one knew you could make money by posting videos of yourself online.
The first people who did them were doing it for fun, and were happy to have a few people viewing and commenting.
Today, posting on Youtube is a real job, and a valid path to becoming multi millionaire celebrities.
Famous Youtubers even get to go through the same thing as Hollywood celebrities.
Sponsorships.
Merchandising and licensing.
Public breakdowns.
You know, the good life.
More recently, high school students from America have even voted being a Youtuber as their number one career choice.
2. Superhero movies
Superheroes used to be something basement dwelling nerds obsess over. Telling people you like superheroes is akin to telling people you are a social outcast.
Sure, there are some superhero movies that did well — like Tim Burton’s Batman or Sam Raimi’s Spiderman — but they were few and far between. Only comic book fans discuss them.
It’s not until Robert Downey Jr. — playing Ironman — showed superheroes can be cool and charismatic before the genre exploded.
Today, everybody likes superheroes and wants to be them. And superhero movies are the biggest movies on the planet.
Each of them costs hundreds of millions of dollars to make and market, and are expected to make a billion dollars back.
These movies also spawned other related projects. Like TV shows, videogames and merchandising.
Nerds know what’s cool and what’s not.
3. Gaming
Here’s another example of nerds knowing what’s cool and what’s not.
Not too long ago, gaming was a niche hobby. Today, it is one of the biggest industries in the world, even outperforming the movie industry.
Not only is it one of the biggest industries in the world, gaming has become a part of daily life for many people. Go to any public places and you’re going to see quite a few people — from all demographics — gaming on their phone.
With Virtual and Augmented Reality on the way — exciting niches by themselves — gaming is going to become even bigger. It may even become our primary way of navigating the world, by gamifying everything around us.
See how successful niches can become? If you want to go big, find a niche and grow it. It’s the surest path to untold riches.
But this doesn’t mean you have to create a whole new industry.
You can still compete in an established industry. You just have to niche further down within your chosen industry. Like how superhero movies are a niche within the action-comedy movie genre.
In fact, it’s recommended to find a niche within an existing industry. Because competition proves demand.
What you want to avoid is replicating your competition without differentiating yourself.
You have to find new and better solutions for existing problems, or find customers that need your solution but don’t know it yet.
That’s what finding a niche is about.
