7 ms·

Start with a Niche

109 points by tablet 6y ago

nwienert 6y ago
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... 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.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Culture wars show up in the blogs, unless the blogs are done by C-level individuals.
ngokevin 6y ago
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. 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.
user-the-name 6y ago
> Radio (1895) > VisiCalc (Excel predecessor, 1979) > Facebook (2004) This is an... interesting version of technological innovation history.
- trestenhortz 6y ago
  “Excel predecessor”. Harsh description of the invention of spreadsheet software.
  - tablet 6y ago
    New generation does not remember it... but I agree
  - giantg2 6y ago
    To the victor goes history.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - hinkley 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure if you use a fat enough marker, or a wide enough brush, you could create a picture where visicalc leads to the ARM M1 processor. There are victors, and there are victors.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    The Lord of the Rings (A Song of Ice and Fire predecessor)
    - skeeter2020 6y ago
      or "Something to keep us entertained until they made those Conan Movies"
trestenhortz 6y ago
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”.
- ngokevin 6y ago
  What are some of the ultimate examples? FB with colleges for sure. Amazon with book sales. Slack used to be for a gaming company? Discord from gaming to general online communites. Twitch from justin to gaming to now just streaming. Airbnb from air beds for conference events.
  - trestenhortz 6y ago
    Yes. Slack was a pivot from gaming.
- carabiner 6y ago
  I guess a better headline would be "Start with a killer application." For aviation it might have been USPS delivering mail by air. Levi's making jeans for miners.
- skeeter2020 6y ago
  The visicalc niche may seem obvious and big now but the venn diagram of accountants who owned home computers and wanted to do their work on them was not that big 40+ years ago
jabo 6y ago
> The niche we choose was product companies from 20 to 200 people. This is still pretty broad for it to be a niche IMO.
- tablet 6y ago
  How you’d narrow it? We tried post-seed Saas product companies but it seems no need to do that since it doesn’t has enough differences to justify the shrink
  - TameAntelope 6y ago
    Field-specific SaaS companies post-F&F, pre-A round with exactly 1 employee (probably an engineer) and two or more founders, where a founder joined later. People who need to communicate with one another because not everyone is on exactly the same page (employee may not have the full context, late arriving founder doesn't know everything yet), and that communication needs to be specific enough to start implementing something, but not so specific that other existing processes would be better suited (e.g. a pitch deck). ...or something like that!
- ozten 6y ago
  +1 that is demographic data, not a niche. A niche is creating a product management tool targeted at SaaS companies building digital marketing tools.
3stripe 6y ago
Remember it's a French word, not something that rhymes with "itch" ;)
jimnotgym 6y ago
I read the homepage and I don't know what fibery does. Am I an idiot, because this seems to happen tho me a lot with modern saas?
- CharlesW 6y ago
  I read this and thought you must be an idiot. Then I read their front page and now think I must also be an idiot. Reading deep into https://fibery.io/about-us https://fibery.io/about-us, it seems like they're a Notion competitor.
  - nzmsv 6y ago
    It's an AI startup. Its main purpose is to raise money, grow the team, and seem sophisticated. That's why they talk about these things first. Nobody knowing what the product does is a feature /s
  - m8s 6y ago
    I like that they have this page: https://fibery.io/blog/fibery-vs-x https://fibery.io/blog/fibery-vs-x I think more companies should call out and explain the differences between their product and some of their competitors. Pretty good idea.
- tobyjsullivan 6y ago
  You might not be the only one. There's literally a button on the homepage labelled "I don't get it, explain it differently." It's effectively a user-friendly database at the end of the day. I used it to plan my wedding and I love it.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    > button on the homepage labelled "I don't get it, explain it differently." This is the r/selfawarewolves of the UX community. I think the video shows a bit better clue of what's going on, but it needs to be condensed. It's trying to show so many things that it has to jump to the next one while you're still absorbing the last one. Show half as much in 70% of the time.
jp57 6y ago
Hasn't this ground already been covered in Crossing the Chasm[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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm
- purerandomness 6y ago
  Everything has already been covered by ancient greek philosophers. That's not a reason to stop sharing insights. They might be useful to someone in a way only you can rephrase them.
  - skeeter2020 6y ago
    but (and I believe the GP shares this question) where is the insight? There are lots of reasons to not just state a commonly accepted strategy and cherry-pick some examples. All I see here is a verbatim rehash of the same ideas and a very confusing website.
    - purerandomness 6y ago
      It's a SEO marketing article. I wouldn't expect insights.
  - xwolfi 6y ago
    Arthemis of Thebes said once that to raise your users' engagement you need to constantly re-activate them with time-limited urgencies ("click now to get a one-time exclusive 10$ coupon"). What you're saying is also how they shot down Galileo or Copernicus. That anyway we shouldn't go beyond rephrasing Aristotle, great scientist, who made so many basic mistakes (in hindsight) that we lost 1000 years of bitter senseless discussion just by the effect of his authority. Fuck the greeks, if you can, that's how you find new ideas (but that's already the discovery of the 15th century renaissance, which triggered eventually the industrial revolution, so people figured that out - and if you're looking at why it's slower elsewhere, it's because they are still stuck in awe at their elders' insights, how long did it take me to convert my confucianist Chinese wife to the idea that "we can marry without me taking an overpriced mortgage over 3 generations" :D)
zkmon 6y ago
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.
mathgladiator 6y ago
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 http://www.adama-lang.org/ http://www.adama-lang.org/ 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.
Bakary 6y ago
I can't tell if the rest of the website is a parody or not. Or perhaps that is an essential element of a successful parody of the modern economy?
moosebear847 6y ago
This article makes me feel misled. Doesn't niche as applied here apply to everything from the wheel to soap? 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.

109 points by tablet 6y ago

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... 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.

hinkley 6y ago
Culture wars show up in the blogs, unless the blogs are done by C-level individuals.

ngokevin 6y ago

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. 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.

user-the-name 6y ago

> Radio (1895) > VisiCalc (Excel predecessor, 1979) > Facebook (2004) This is an... interesting version of technological innovation history.

trestenhortz 6y ago
“Excel predecessor”. Harsh description of the invention of spreadsheet software.
- tablet 6y ago
  New generation does not remember it... but I agree
- giantg2 6y ago
  To the victor goes history.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure if you use a fat enough marker, or a wide enough brush, you could create a picture where visicalc leads to the ARM M1 processor. There are victors, and there are victors.
- hinkley 6y ago
  The Lord of the Rings (A Song of Ice and Fire predecessor)
  - skeeter2020 6y ago
    or "Something to keep us entertained until they made those Conan Movies"

trestenhortz 6y ago

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”.

ngokevin 6y ago
What are some of the ultimate examples? FB with colleges for sure. Amazon with book sales. Slack used to be for a gaming company? Discord from gaming to general online communites. Twitch from justin to gaming to now just streaming. Airbnb from air beds for conference events.
- trestenhortz 6y ago
  Yes. Slack was a pivot from gaming.
carabiner 6y ago
I guess a better headline would be "Start with a killer application." For aviation it might have been USPS delivering mail by air. Levi's making jeans for miners.
skeeter2020 6y ago
The visicalc niche may seem obvious and big now but the venn diagram of accountants who owned home computers and wanted to do their work on them was not that big 40+ years ago

jabo 6y ago

> The niche we choose was product companies from 20 to 200 people. This is still pretty broad for it to be a niche IMO.

tablet 6y ago
How you’d narrow it? We tried post-seed Saas product companies but it seems no need to do that since it doesn’t has enough differences to justify the shrink
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  Field-specific SaaS companies post-F&F, pre-A round with exactly 1 employee (probably an engineer) and two or more founders, where a founder joined later. People who need to communicate with one another because not everyone is on exactly the same page (employee may not have the full context, late arriving founder doesn't know everything yet), and that communication needs to be specific enough to start implementing something, but not so specific that other existing processes would be better suited (e.g. a pitch deck). ...or something like that!
ozten 6y ago
+1 that is demographic data, not a niche. A niche is creating a product management tool targeted at SaaS companies building digital marketing tools.

3stripe 6y ago

Remember it's a French word, not something that rhymes with "itch" ;)

jimnotgym 6y ago

I read the homepage and I don't know what fibery does. Am I an idiot, because this seems to happen tho me a lot with modern saas?

CharlesW 6y ago
I read this and thought you must be an idiot. Then I read their front page and now think I must also be an idiot. Reading deep into https://fibery.io/about-us https://fibery.io/about-us, it seems like they're a Notion competitor.
- nzmsv 6y ago
  It's an AI startup. Its main purpose is to raise money, grow the team, and seem sophisticated. That's why they talk about these things first. Nobody knowing what the product does is a feature /s
- m8s 6y ago
  I like that they have this page: https://fibery.io/blog/fibery-vs-x https://fibery.io/blog/fibery-vs-x I think more companies should call out and explain the differences between their product and some of their competitors. Pretty good idea.
tobyjsullivan 6y ago
You might not be the only one. There's literally a button on the homepage labelled "I don't get it, explain it differently." It's effectively a user-friendly database at the end of the day. I used it to plan my wedding and I love it.
- hinkley 6y ago
  > button on the homepage labelled "I don't get it, explain it differently." This is the r/selfawarewolves of the UX community. I think the video shows a bit better clue of what's going on, but it needs to be condensed. It's trying to show so many things that it has to jump to the next one while you're still absorbing the last one. Show half as much in 70% of the time.

jp57 6y ago

Hasn't this ground already been covered in Crossing the Chasm[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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

purerandomness 6y ago
Everything has already been covered by ancient greek philosophers. That's not a reason to stop sharing insights. They might be useful to someone in a way only you can rephrase them.
- skeeter2020 6y ago
  but (and I believe the GP shares this question) where is the insight? There are lots of reasons to not just state a commonly accepted strategy and cherry-pick some examples. All I see here is a verbatim rehash of the same ideas and a very confusing website.
  - purerandomness 6y ago
    It's a SEO marketing article. I wouldn't expect insights.
- xwolfi 6y ago
  Arthemis of Thebes said once that to raise your users' engagement you need to constantly re-activate them with time-limited urgencies ("click now to get a one-time exclusive 10$ coupon"). What you're saying is also how they shot down Galileo or Copernicus. That anyway we shouldn't go beyond rephrasing Aristotle, great scientist, who made so many basic mistakes (in hindsight) that we lost 1000 years of bitter senseless discussion just by the effect of his authority. Fuck the greeks, if you can, that's how you find new ideas (but that's already the discovery of the 15th century renaissance, which triggered eventually the industrial revolution, so people figured that out - and if you're looking at why it's slower elsewhere, it's because they are still stuck in awe at their elders' insights, how long did it take me to convert my confucianist Chinese wife to the idea that "we can marry without me taking an overpriced mortgage over 3 generations" :D)

zkmon 6y ago

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.

mathgladiator 6y ago

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 http://www.adama-lang.org/ http://www.adama-lang.org/ 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.

Bakary 6y ago

I can't tell if the rest of the website is a parody or not. Or perhaps that is an essential element of a successful parody of the modern economy?

moosebear847 6y ago

This article makes me feel misled. Doesn't niche as applied here apply to everything from the wheel to soap? 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.