BBO Show with Kyle & Harms

BBO.SHOW #20

Create your first successful business online by nailing your niche

Share:

What you’ll learn in today’s show

BBO.SHOW #20 – Create your first successful business online by nailing your niche

Hey Harms here, thanks for watching today’s show, if you have not yet then…

What you will learn in today’s show:

  • What is a business
  • Understand the concept of product/market fit
  • Examples of niche
  • Answering the Q: What if my niche is too small?
  • How will I know if it’s the right niche?
  • What if I get the wrong niche?
  • What is the difference between online business tools/techniques and what we are discussion

The focus area is: Business niche.

Important links

+ Free Online Business & Digital Marketing group +

Want to ask Kyle or me any questions? Easily join our free private Slack group here:

Join free Slack group here: https://bit.ly/34n2EH5

(Slack asks you for your email address to verify you are a real person before you join – we do not get this email address)

+ Show Notes +

Show notes and more at https://bbo.show

+ Subscribe +

Subscribe to the show now and remember we go live every day at 12 PM GMT. 

+ Mega List, 300+ different ways to make money online +

The PUBLIC list for quick access: https://bit.ly/2W4AigR

Purchase the guide with our personal notes for each category here for just $0.99: https://bbo.show/book

+ Social Media +

Obviously follow Harms (me) on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/toortalks/
And Kyle on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/kylebalmer/

Read the transcript instead…

Transcript

BBO.SHOW #20: Create your first successful business online by nailing your niche

What is Business

Kyle: If you have spent any time with us at all you’ll know that Harms and I use a framework called the BATON framework. 

Very briefly it is business, audience, tribe, offer and network.

The first element of the framework that we teach and this is a framework for starting an online business, really any online business. 

The first element is business because people often forget that an online business is still at its heart a business. It needs to make sense as a business and then we lay on top of that online tools and techniques but it still needs to be a business. 

We have people approach us and work with people who may not have put down the groundwork to work out what the business is before they start an online business. That’s what we’re going to focus on in this guide. 

It is extremely foundational; we’re going to go through what a business is and how you define your business for the greatest amount of success. 

While it sounds extremely rudimentary it’s also fundamental for your latest success. 

The later levels of the process you can tweak around you make changes, you can improve things, you can scrap ideas that aren’t working, you can make changes, but if the fundamental business at the heart isn’t working, or it is not a good business it doesn’t matter. 

You can tweak whatever you want and it’s not going to make a difference if the underlying business does not stack up. 

You can do as much polishing as you want to, as much improvement optimisation on your business but if the underlying business isn’t sound it doesn’t matter, it’s a waste of time and money. 

We’re going through the process of how you make sure that your business idea, product idea, and your market all of these core elements are locked down so that you can then build your online business upon this solid foundation.

Harms: There’s also a topic that entrepreneurs out there, or people selling a tool and technique which will give you the magic appeal in order to provide you the success or the cash to create an online business. 

Now they don’t like to talk about the subject and I’m not quite sure why that is. 

But it is not discussed for various reasons but without this there’s nothing to build off which is why it’s the first element as part of the BATON system which we teach. 

Warren Buffet spoke about the fact that there are some fantastic experts in the world like Sam Nunn. What they’ve been working on in the background projects which help support the world, the globe, the US against global pandemics, against nuclear warfare. 

Things that are extremely high risk alongside people like Bill Gates who are talking about the subject as well, and they have done for many years. 

However, Sam Nunn was talking about this, five, six, seven years ago and posted the lecture onto YouTube. He’s already laid out everything that we’re experiencing now with foresight. This is his job to protect the globe, US against things like this. 

It didn’t even hit a thousand views at the time of Warren Buffett describing it. 

That is no different to somebody talking about what we are speaking about the fundamental business concepts which allow you an online business success. 

Whereas somebody talking about a Covid-19 conspiracy theory has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views. 

That’s shiny, exciting that’s entertaining, but actually it’s built on a true foundation of what we’re speaking about in this guide and hopefully that gives you some context on how things as important as this are just not discussed, because they don’t seem to be exciting. 

But somebody once told me that once your business is boring. 

Once your business becomes a consistent routine like, then you’ve nailed it.

[show_more more=”+ CLICK TO VIEW ENTIRE TRANSCRIPT” less=”- CLICK TO COLLAPSE” color=”#000000″]

Kyle: That’s where the money is.

Harms: You’ve turned something into a boring cash machine, an ATM which is boring, you’ve created that. 

It doesn’t play on our excitement. It doesn’t attract us to the shiny items but the moment you hit that you’ve now made it in the sense that you’ve got a successful business that is operating, it just may seem boring to everybody else. 

Kyle what’s the goal of this guide?

Kyle: Now we’re not saying that your business is boring but when you get to that level where you’re out of the excitement of trying the new thing and working out what is going to be the next best thing and your business is chugging along, making money that means you’ve made it. 

People who teach online business will do so in front of their sports car. Or they’ll be waving their phone around showing you their earnings and they will talk about the sexy part. 

The, I don’t need to work to make money automatically. I follow this easy three step process and now I have a sports car and a beautiful girlfriend, boyfriend, and a massive house etc. 

They’re selling the sizzle, not the steak, and a lot of the time these get rich quick schemes where a certain tool or technique is being sold and really the only person making money is the person teaching that tool or technique not the customers or students buying into that particular process. 

We’re going to step back and look at online business as a subset of business as a whole, which means we’re going to spend this week laying down the foundations of what this business is. 

The goal of the guide is we’re going to work out your particular business niche. 

We’re going to have a written statement and it has to be written down. 

A written statement of your niche and because we have this written statement down the next steps in building a business become a lot easier because you can keep referring back to that. 

So when there’s a decision on should I be doing this option or this option it becomes a lot easier when we have this North Star that we can align to and say according to the statement I have of what my business is, what we do I know what to do. 

It becomes a lot simpler, so it is worth taking the time to get the statement down.

Harms: That statement will be broken down. 

We’re breaking it down to the high-level questions and diving deep into that question. 

When determining your statement which helps you identify the niche area of focus that is going to be your focus for building and starting this particular idea and turning it into a business. 

Then when we focus on a handful of questions. Those are questions which formed the category of who, what, how and why massively important.

Kyle: Most businesses do not have this, they will pick up clients and try anything that happens and they do not have this statement and if you have those elements locked down, it becomes a lot easier. 

We’re also going to be adding on why, the why in this particular is why you? 

Why your business?

What are you bringing to the table that means that you are the person who is helping yoga teachers to get more clients by bringing their business online?

Why are you the person going to be doing that? 

What is your distinguishing factor? 

It’s going to require reflection on your part, you are going to have to think unfortunately. 

It would be nice if I could give you a checklist but you’re going to look at your existing business if you have one, or you need to look at your options for starting a business and really reflect about what makes sense.

Harms: Because you could have an existing business as it is but it’s just too wide, so we’re talking about becoming niche and having a niche statement, serving a niche client. 

You may look back on your business and say actually when I started this, I did have a niche category and then I grew wide and now I no longer have an identity and sales are suffering because of that. 

Maybe you strayed too far away from the North Star which has taken you away from the niche which is where it was way more profitable but also enjoyable, in line with what you are doing in terms of this is a business I can wake up and work on. 

That’s just as important to help visualise and understand at this point, because once you start a business journey, once you start to create a company it’s going to be a large part of your life. 

It’s also going to come with the emotional rollercoaster that is attached to a business, the time, sacrifices plus the positive results. 

So if anybody has started a business you’ll already know this and appreciate this which is probably why you’re more hesitant to go to actually put yourself through this exercise again, or more hesitant to pivot because you’ve been through that process and you may say, actually, I’ve got something that’s working but not as well as I’d like to. 

If I change it I’ve got to go back to that place where effort is required. 

Whereas if you are starting a new business by following this process, you will save time and money, and that emotional energy which also affects people in your family.

All of that comes into play when building this business so that also gets factored in here, not specifically what you’re serving but think about it in terms of is this what I would like to be doing for the next six months, the next year? 

That’s the key question, but only once you have this in place because right now we don’t know what you want to be doing. 

It’s like do I want to have a business? 

Yes, but what should that business be doing? 

What niche should it serve? 

How do I want to serve those customers? 

Those are all unknown answers to then ask the final question is this something I want to commit time to? 

Because there are lots of ways to make money online and lots and lots and lots and lots of ways. 

Lots of marketplaces to enter, but it also will align with what you would like to do as well and this is a conversation of also chasing the cash versus chasing something that you enjoy, which comes along with remuneration as well.

Kyle: You can do both if you manage to nail the questions. 

If you manage to find your niche where it’s profitable, you help a lot of people and you enjoy it, if you wake up with a spring in your step every morning to serve this niche, that is great. 

Which connects to the people who do already have the business. I understand there will be hesitation, why would I want to go through this process? 

When you have an existing business and existing product or service there is always going to be an emotional attachment, baggage attached to it which is why if you’re coming at this fresh you’re in a really good position. 

You can go through the process without any of these additional emotional connections. 

If you do have a business I would recommend applying the process we’re going to be going through either to a new business or a new project within your existing business. 

This will allow you to focus on the process more without that additional extra baggage. You can absolutely do this with your core business, it’s just going to be a bit trickier. 

This is going to be up to you if you can, though, come at it with an open mind, clean slate so either a new business or a new project within your existing business. 

Then once you’ve done it with a clean new project maybe then you can start applying these tools to your wider business.

A final big advantage whether you don’t have an idea or a business at the moment or you do once you go through this process and you’ve done it a few times it becomes a very quick process. 

Because you’ve experienced it. 

You understand the steps, you understand the creative thought involved in it, plus the systematic thought which is using both sides of the hemisphere of the brain at this stage. 

It just allows you to do it quicker and quicker and quicker.

If you are coming at this new and you didn’t have the framework you might latch onto one idea and then plug away at it for the next six months or year before realising actually, this isn’t going to work. 

We tend to get attached to ideas, especially people who have not started a business before. 

We’re going to show you a framework which allows you to take a business idea and quickly run it through a number of steps and at the end come out with no this isn’t going to work, or absolutely fantastic full steam ahead. 

If you can do that with 10 ideas or one hundred ideas, then you’re going to come out with a lot more gold nuggets from the process. 

Whereas if you focus on one idea and chug through it for the next six months and it doesn’t happen to be a good idea because the product doesn’t fit the market, or the market doesn’t exist. 

Whatever the reason, then you’ve wasted a lot of time, so this is going to be a useful skill that you can apply to your businesses and help friends, acquaintances, and help people you work with their ideas as well.

Harms: It is actually coming at this from an open mind which says I’m not going to get attached to any of my ideas unless it has gone through a process like this. 

Which means you don’t spend six months just thinking about the idea and telling your partner this is a great idea. 

A year has gone down the line you haven’t tested whereas compare that to somebody who comes up with 10, 20 new ideas every single day, they quickly analyse them and then move on. I’m not going to get emotionally attached to any of these because they don’t work, they work and it’s not for me or something in between. 

That’s where we want to get you to a place where you can identify a niche that you actually love, enjoy and would like to be a part of.

Kyle:  If you are holding onto ideas that are precious, precious babies that’s something you will need to release because through this process you might realise a lot of these ideas don’t work for whatever reason.

Concept of Product/Market Fit

Harms: Let’s start with the first important question, which is what is a business?

Kyle: This is a loaded term for people. 

People think of business and immediately they’re thinking Saturday morning cartoon villain, a guy with a top hat like an evil corporation, chopping down trees. Getting up to all sorts of dreadful things. 

A business can have a lot of negative connotations attached to it, especially for people who don’t own a business. 

We need to get past that as those are value judgments when we think about businessmen or businesswomen the best definition of a business is from a book called the personal MBA by Josh Kaufman. 

He wrote the book as the placement to getting an MBA because getting an MBA costs around $100,000. 

He goes through all the concepts of what business is, all the different ideas and concepts that you would get in the MBA. I think he does a much better job of it. The first thing he does is define what a business is.

Harms: I went back after years of actually being part of business.

When I read that after being a business owner I was like, it just seems much clearer now after having that definition because it’s all a blur.

Kyle: We think of the building and the boss, headquarters, and HR. We have a weird vision on what a business is. 

So roughly defined a business is a repeatable process that creates and delivers something of value, that’s number one. Number two other people want or need, number three at a price they are willing to pay. Number four in a way that satisfies the customers’ needs and expectations. Number five so the business brings in enough profit to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation. 

He says at the core of every business is fundamentally a collection of five interdependent processes, each which flows into the next. 

They come one after another and they are all connected. 

One is value creation. Discover what people need or want. 

Then creating it, two marketing, attracting attention and building demand for what you have created. Three sales, turning prospective customers into paying customers. 

Four value delivery, giving your customers what you promised and ensuring they’re satisfied and five finances. 

Bringing in enough money to keep going to make your efforts worthwhile. 

The core of all of this is a business is something that creates a unit of value, that’s a product or service and it provides it to a market who wants that product or service. 

If you do not have the value, i.e. a product or service. There’s nothing to sell. There is no value for you to provide that one product. 

Two, there needs to be a market for this product. 

It’s all well and good if you create something wonderful but nobody is interested and you’re the only person who is interested. That’s not a business that’s a hobby. 

You need to create something of value that people are interested in not only interested in, they need to three be willing to pay you for it. 

You might have created something that people are happy to take for free and that’s again not a business that’s a charity at that point, you’re giving something lots of people want it, but as soon as you say it’s £5 they’re like I don’t want it. 

That’s three sales you need to be able to sell those people interested in your product and then four you need to actually follow-up on what it is you promised. 

Your product needs to be valuable. You need to deliver it to the people and they’ve paid you for it. You need to make sure whatever they’ve paid for they’re happy with and it works, it delivers whatever value they expected. 

If you missed this step you are a fraudster. 

You’ve created a product, you have got people excited about it, they give you money for it, and then you do not deliver it. 

You’ve sold them something which doesn’t exist.

Harms: That is also a big challenge that people face. 

They get to step four and then they get the customer needs and expectations back and they are way off, misaligned completely. 

This is what you were selling, this is what they got, whereas what Josh Kaufman says this is what you’re selling and this it what they get. It should be in perfect harmony.

Kyle: The final step is you’ve created something of value, you found people who are interested in what you created. You have sold it to them, they’re willing to pay you money. 

You have also delivered the product and they like what you have delivered. They love the value. 

The last part is finance. 

Have you managed to sell it to them at a price that means you’ve made a profit? 

You could have done all these things you’ve sold your product for £100 to thousands of people that are really happy, they love what you’ve done but it costs you £200 to make and deliver the product, that’s not a business. 

You’ve just lost a lot of money and that’s the final step, it needs to make economic sense for you to continue operating. 

It needs to be profitable after all costs, after your staffing, production, inventory, whatever you need to have enough money left for it to be worthwhile for you to keep growing.

Harms: It is something that is often again overlooked, it’s a fundamental practice which they don’t talk about, pricing in itself is a massive topic. 

But to keep it simple the profit needs to be there in order to one, continue operating. 

Operating can mean reinvestment, which is reapplication of those profits into a new project, into a new idea. 

The profit is massively important in the business.

Kyle: It is for growth not just to pay yourself, it’s to be able to keep stepping up.

The BATON framework basically follows this. It is a little bit different, but we have business, audience, tribe, offer and network, so business aligns with the first two of Josh Kaufman’s business definitions. 

We are creating and delivering something of value that’s a product that other people need or want. 

That is the market. Product and market and then the rest of it ATON that aligns with marketing sales, value delivery and finance. 

If we can find the product market fit for your niche, then we’re quid’s in. 

Product market fit is fine. You can have a product let’s say I have made this telephone and it’s a good product, it works, having the product by itself is nothing unless I also have a market that is interested in whatever that product is. 

You need both. 

You cannot just have a product without a market. 

Otherwise you’re going to end up with boxes and boxes of whatever your product is. Vice versa if there’s a big market but you don’t have a product, you are also not in the game. 

Unless I have a product or service I am able to provide them, unless I have value to put into that market I’m not in business.

Harms: No amount of money, finance that you throw at a market that doesn’t exist. 

You may have an idea you think is cracking, but if the market doesn’t exist, no amount of money, finance that you throw out will help override the process. 

The concept of a product and a market fitted together. I don’t mean in the sense start-up start amount of funding, I don’t mean a bank loan. But this is at the fundamental level, which is 5,000 and 10,000, £50,000 savings and I’m going to throw it at this market in whatever form that is. 

One of the most dangerous forms is advertising. 

I’m going to advertise to this marketplace and they’re going to love my product. 

Again when I say no amount of money it can mean small amounts or it could mean the giant amount. That leads us nicely onto what we are trying to do here? 

We’re trying to find a niche that we can then market so that we have a niche idea, the product and we have the market that exists because we’ve qualified it. 

We’ve tested to see if the market exists what we really want to be focusing on is actually finding your niche and you’re going to hear that term a lot with online business.

Remember the goal is to create a niche statement to serve a specific audience. 

Nowadays the market is massive, it’s loud and noisy. 

There are a lot of big players serving large parts of the market, but there are still lots of untapped niche parts of that market that exist. There’s a whole blue ocean versus red ocean philosophy here.

If we went for a large niche or a large market like health too big.

Nowadays you can’t go for something that large because of the Internet because of how media is now structured, everything’s been fragmented. 

Kyle: Joe Wicks is a big name at the moment and even he has picked a niche and he’s narrowed it down to the quick meals that can be made in 15 minutes, mainly plant-based. 

He does a lot of stuff with kids. 

Previously in the 1980s or so before you could have one individual who would dominate all of the market, that is no longer the case anymore. Everything is so fragmented because we have so many different ways to consume media. 

The last big show which everybody watched was friends on Fox, that was probably the last big show that everybody in the world watched. You can reference Friends and people get it. 

That is no longer the case because TV is a good example fragmented into so many different channels now we have streaming services. 

It is impossible for anyone to make that much impact. 

The idea of mass media and mass markets has been demolished because now we have so many different options we can be consuming media and listening to experts and making purchases on so many different platforms that the idea of just being everything to everyone it doesn’t work, it no longer exists.

Harms: What we can do though is speak directly because we have access to them directly into people’s interests, which can be very specific. Going from Coca-Cola into now these niche fizzy drinks, soft drinks brands that pop-up which are boutique and would I rather pay extra for. For example Karma cola, it’s an organic cola versus the general coca cola as an example. 

The idea was to appeal to people who like cola but they want organic, fair trade, they wanted it so it doesn’t have the dark enterprise identity that coca cola does, so they created a niche there.

Now is an amazing time to be able to do this because, let’s assume that the red ocean is what Coca-Cola used to be, or a company like that. 

We’re identifying the blue ocean which means a market exists, the red ocean means there’s no market, but because the way the media has changed in the way we can now speak to people.

We can speak to their interest and they have a choice on what they now consume, purchase, interact with. 

Whereas before we didn’t have a choice, it was very limited because of the distribution of media channels available.

Kyle: Now we have the tools at our disposal to reach out directly to our niche. 

The main thing here is you need to change the way you think if your business statement in your head you’re like this is applicable to everybody, it is not. 

That is not how the landscape works, you need to be able to niche down and find your people, people interested in you and will buy from you. This requires a massive mindset shift. 

The main thing for you is we need to define this niche. 

If you just say I do health that is too wide. We need a statement like, I help males aged between 40 and 55 to lose their beer gut that they’ve built up over years of working in the professional sector. 

It needs to be extremely niche and narrow and we need to know who those people are we’re serving, but because of the Internet, we can directly target them. 

We can directly talk to those particular people. 

So while it sounds like we’re saying make your business smaller, we’re not, we’re saying make it more focused, find that niche and serve those people just blow their minds with the specificity of your product and you’ll find there will be more than enough within that niche. 

Instead of going wide and selling to nobody we’re going to go micro niche and sell a lot to a small group and then we can grow from there.

 

Examples of niches

Harms: In the early stages we want an audience size which is as small as possible but still viable, we’re talking about a size which is applicable that will still generate a profit and allow you to operate. 

The smallest possible audience we can find is better as we can talk directly to them, you have this problem because you just left your career after 40 years and you’ve been sitting in the office chair in the City of London, and now you need to get back your skeletal structure. 

I’m talking to your problem you have and I want to serve you. I don’t care about somebody outside of London. 

I don’t care about somebody who’s been working in an office for two years, I’m interested in people who have worked in the office for 40 years as an example. 

Smallest possible audience that we can serve and still be profitable.

Kyle: You can make a profitable business in some really weird niches. 

There’s a website called niche hacks which I’d recommend you have a look at. 

This guy goes through the data from various niches online and he finds them from a data driven point of view. But niche hacks go through lots of potential niches and draw out some very obscure examples.

One warning here, don’t go on there looking for a niche for you to follow. 

Don’t just go on the site thinking I need a business; you need to be genuinely interested in it. Just because there is a market and because you can maybe put together a product doesn’t mean that you are the right person to serve this market. 

So have a look around because it’s interesting to see some of the weird and extremely specific niches that exist which are profitable, but do not go there just to shop.

Harms: Also weird is just our opinion of that category but what is weird to us is not to somebody else. 

It clearly has an audience size which is waiting to be served.

Concern: niche is too small

Kyle: When we talk about niche we’re talking about a section of a subsection of a section of a section, we’re going down into something extremely specific. 

Concern number one is that the niche is too small.

 If it is two people then yes too small, what we’re going to be showing you is how you size a niche, how you get to a sensible size. 

However, even if your niche is a thousand people and they pay you £30 a month, that’s £30,000 a month. Even if it’s a very small group if you can provide enough value you can generate a lot of revenue. 

I would say a lot of people worry that the niche is too small, whereas the real problem here is a niche being too big.

 It is a much better problem to have, to be in a position where you dominate your niche making lots of sales, you’re making money, and you’ve saturated the market. 

From there you have the cash and the clout and power to grow into other niches that’s much better than starting wide not selling anything, nobody recognising you for being an expert. 

From there, there’s nothing you can do, you don’t have a business.

Harms: Because what happens when you go too wide and we’ve faced this within our agency, which is customer one wants this, customer two wants something slightly different. 

Customer three wants something different, that’s a practical and logistical challenge as well because where do you draw your energy to? 

Whereas if we niche down customers one, two three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten all want exactly the same thing, exactly the same expectations it becomes so much more simpler for you to build this.

Kyle: If you have an extremely precise definition of what it is you provide then people are much more likely to be satisfied with your service, whereas if you’re rummaging around trying to customise there is more likelihood that whatever you deliver won’t be up to par.

Concern: How will I know it’s the right niche? 

Harms: It becomes difficult to scale and get to that point where you can now enter a new niche, that seems like a distant idea but it’s so far away, you can’t get there because we are now so far off course to have got to a specific niche. 

That’s concern number one, is my niche too small? 

Concern number two is how will I know if it is the right niche? 

I think it’s the right niche, but there has to be some information out there which can help me find this answer. 

The market will determine this. 

It means if we go to number three people will pay for it. 

When somebody will pay you for it then we know there is a need here, this niche has a marketplace and then when multiple people pay for it now you know you’re onto something. 

Now you know you’ve got the right niche.

Kyle: People will tell you they like what you’re doing, they will easily make those promises but it is not until they hand over the cash that it matters. 

Sony famously did a focus group where they were showing people different Walkman’s and they had this bright yellow one. They had it on the table with all the other Walkman’s and they’d ask people what they thought about the yellow one. 

Everyone was like it’s great, I’d look so cool with it and then at the end of the market research they said you can take any of the items you want for free and nobody took the yellow one. 

People will tell you one thing and if you introduce money to the equation, it’s even more different. 

It’s only when people hand over cash do you actually know it’s going to work. 

From a practical point of view we’re going to be using the lean methodology which is basically we get the most basic version of the product ready as soon as possible and take it to market. 

We ask for money based on this, a lot less money as it is not the final version. 

This allows us to gauge whether the market is actually interested in what we are selling or not, and it allows us to do this without spending six months producing the final product and then taking it to market.

What we don’t want to do is take six months, 12 months to find out if this is the right niche. 

We want to go through as many right niches as possible, we want to be testing many niches as possible within that six months versus testing one for the whole six months. 

That’s the whole basis of the lean methodology. 

Let’s detach ourselves emotionally from our ideas, but let’s quickly go through ideas that work, find a niche and that’s the process we want to run through.

Concern: Wrong niche? 

Harms: The third concern is what if i am in the wrong niche? 

What if I’ve taken a product to people and they are not interested, what then? 

This is why we use minimum viability products; basic versions and we get them to market quickly because they are faster and cheaper. 

If we did spend six months building a product then releasing it to market and everybody is not interested, we’ve wasted six months. 

Whereas if we build a product in a week or two a really stripped-down basic version of the product we take it to people and they say, not interested we’ve only wasted a week or two. 

We can do something in lean start up. 

It’s called pivot; we take that information and we make a change. 

Kyle: A lot of the time, you can retain a lot of core elements of the previous version.

 Let’s say I’m doing backyard chickens. Nobody cares about backyard chickens. I’m not able to sell anything, I’ve made a guide, a nice PDF guide. 

I might pivot to backyard bees; you’d pivot into a different market or you change your product. 

You make these experiments small; you make them survivable so you’re not spending £10,000 developing the product only to find out that nobody wants it. 

Instead you’re spending a bit of time, maybe a few hundred pounds tops trying it out.

A note on getting Rich Quick

Harms: That’s the three main concerns, we spoke about, is the niche too small? 

How will I know if it’s the right niche? 

And what if I’m stuck in the wrong niche? 

Hopefully by answering that you’re now ready to work through this process and we’ve got a final word of warning which is a note on differentiating this process to a common title which floats about which is to get rich quick. 

Believing or thinking that a get rich quick tool or technique is going to be the answer here whereas actually no, let’s start with a principle which is identify my niche first then these tools and techniques can help. 

Because what tools and techniques are people pushing out at the moment?

Kyle: The big one is fulfilled by Amazon FBA, affiliate marketing, Kindle publishing, drop shipping, social media marketing. 

We get the question a lot which is which online business should I start? 

Generally when people ask, what they mean is, should I sell things on Amazon or should I do affiliate marketing or should I publish e-books? 

Those aren’t businesses, those are tools and techniques which can be used by a business, but they are not in and of themselves businesses. 

That’s the wrong question to be asking. 

It’s not to say that these tools or techniques do not work, you just need to know how you use them in the context of what your actual business is.

There’s nothing wrong with Fulfilled by Amazon itself; it just needs to exist within an actual business.

Harms: The tools and techniques help facilitate our business and once you know what the business is then of course, go ahead and master fulfilled by Amazon make sure you know it inside out. 

But don’t feel like that is the answer, that’s the magic pill which creates your business that’s just something that helps facilitate the business. 

Same as Kindle publishing or e-book publishing that is the way we get our business niche idea out and helps facilitate that process. 

The fact that we publish on Kindle books is not the business itself that’s the key message.

 So what’s the right question to be asking?

Kyle: The question is fine which business should I start online, it is just we need to know what a business is. 

So when we’re looking at something like Fulfilled by Amazon or drop shipping we know that is not actually a business, that’s just a methodology, a tool. 

The question of what business should I start online is fine as long as we know what we mean by business. 

So what value can I create?

Are there people interested enough to buy that value for me? 

How will I be delivering that value and can I deliver that value and sell it for enough money so that there is a sustainable business? 

These are the big questions and your answer might be backyard chickens, that’s going to be the answer to what business should I start online? 

Your niche should be helping people to raise chickens in their backyard for eggs. 

That’s the answer, not drop shipping or Kindle.

Harms:  Fill your boots with the tools and techniques once you’ve nailed down this guide. 

This is going to be fundamental to actually allowing those tools to feel like they were successful tools worth the investment, were worth the learning investment. 

Or the fact you have to pay a facilitated amount to make it happen. 

Plug a viable product, something that someone wants into that tool or technique and then you’ll start to see results.

That’s the key we work through this process. 

You can use it again and again and again into the future, then we can start to use it as exciting experiments, rather than, it’s going to take me a whole week to do this. 

Once you nail this once it’s not going to take you a whole week it’s going to be extremely quick.

Kyle: It might seem like a lot of work to go through a whole week just to end up with one sentence, but that sentence is a statement of what your business is going to be so important. 

If you can get that statement sentence by the end of this week your success is going to be a lot easier moving forward.

Even if it looks super simple if you put work into each of those elements, those parameters within this statement it’s going to be an extremely valuable asset going forward.

What you have learned so far:

  • What is a business
  • Understand the concept of product/market fit
  • Examples of niche
  • Answering the Q: What if my niche is too small?
  • How will I know if it’s the right niche?
  • What if I get the wrong niche?
  • What is the difference between online business tools/techniques and what we are discussion

[/show_more]

Share:

Get online business inside info from us

Tools, tricks, techniques (and other things beginning with 't') straight to you inbox.