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Let me tell you one thing.
Nicheing is a powerful way to get started for a business.It is low cost, allows you to communicate with the necessary clients and solve a specific need. Nicheing is great, and it is a great way to get started.
However, there is a trap with focusing on one niche.
You pigeonhole yourself.
Think of this example, you build a niche community forum that provides you advertising revenue. Let’s give a popular example - Minecraft.
This community is popular, and with each update people share their fun stories, building up engagement and making the community a valuable resource. Then suddenly, as tastes change, you see your community post less and less frequently. Worst of all, the Minecraft team announces that they will be posting their last update, and then closing down multiplayer servers in 6 months. Your community is dead. Alas.
This is a good example of pigeonholing. You niche into something, but you can’t pivot as it doesn’t make sense to pivot. What can you pivot to other than Minecraft? Being hyper niche makes you vulnerable to obsolescence. That’s why you need to develop exit strategies to make sure your business doesn’t disappear.
There are many ways you can pigeonhole yourself. Let’s say you use whatsapp for business communications. Let’s imagine that whatsapp suddenly loses service (a data center blew up). If you can no longer talk to clients, you are in big trouble. The minecraft problem, just like the whatsapp problem, are both examples of platform risks.
How do you mitigate platform risk?
Easy, you make multiple chains of redundancy. Don’t just chat on whatsapp, chat on signal and telegram too! Don’t just niche to a minecraft community, niche into the video game improvement and updates niche! That makes sure that you have multiple platforms so that you can survive platforms getting phased out.
Just like there are risks of your business getting pigeonholed, there is a risk of obsolescence if you don’t keep abreast of technological advancements. Just like the horse and buggy got beat by the railroad and the car, so can your business become technologically pigeonholed and slaughtered. You need to keep close attention to everything as a business owner.
The best businesspeople have a healthy fear of falling behind - even as an industry leader.
Schedule a consultation with me if you want to learn more about how to get your business on the right track. Whether you are just starting out, or are scaling, or if you are worried your business falls into the trap of obsolescence, I can help you.
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