Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

Niche

Choices and trade-offs

One of my absolute favourite books on business strategy is Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t by Kevin Maney and Jim Collins.

I was re-reading it yesterday and this quote from the intro struck me:

If business leaders fail to make choices—fanatical, obsessive, focused, disciplined choices—to build for the long term, and succumb instead to grasping as much as they can in the short term, they will build mediocre companies.

The reality is, we make trade-offs in our businesses whether we’re intentional about them or not. If we don’t make them, they happen to us.

There’s no right answer for everyone—it just depends on what you want to build and whether you’re willing to make the necessary trade-offs to get there.

How to stand out in a sea of competitors

Do you feel like it’s hard to stand out among the sea of other marketing consultants?

One of your available secret weapons for standing out is going smaller either in what you do or who you do it for.

My preferred approach is picking a smaller target audience and going deeper on serving their few core needs.

You can pick a smaller pond and make a bigger splash—which makes standing out a lot easier.

Once you get traction, you can begin to broaden again if and when the time feels right. Or, you could do smaller again.

It’s counter-intuitive, but standing out more often means going smaller, not broader.

Using focus to your advantage

Over time, your business will accrue “things”.

Projects, products, services, clients, team members, domains, subscriptions, commitments, promised deliverables—all kinds of things.

Each “thing” represents some degree of resources and/or mental overhead. And there’s only so much to go around.

Remember to keep stripping out the things in your business that no longer serve you.

Use focus to your advantage.

The smallest possible step

We all get stuck sometimes. We want to do something but for some reason we don’t act on it.

So instead, we dance around it. We procrastinate. We ponder. We ask a few people what they think.

Their positive assurances gives us some relief from the tension. It feels like progress has been made.

But then nothing happens. The idea fades away. We lose interest, and tomorrow it’s something else.

Repeat the process all over again.

What’s really happening?

Fear is happening. Whether you call it that or not, that’s what it is.

And we all experience it—especially with the ideas most dear to our hearts. Which is all the more reason we shouldn’t give into it.

If you want to see if an idea will work, take the smallest possible step.

You don’t know if something will work—or even if you’ll like it—unless you try. Take the smallest possible step.

Fall in love with the process—not your products

It’s okay to fall in love with your products and services.

The details of what you do, how you package and price it, your business model or the delivery mechanism you use, the craftsmanship… everything.

That’s all fine and well.

But if you want to be in business a long time, it’s a lot better to fall in love with the process of finding solutions to the challenges your ideal clients care about solving.

So yes, fall in love with your craft. But stay flexible about how you solve problems until you find what works—and then keep innovating forever.

170. Building around your super-consumers

Super-consumers are the 10% of your customers who account for upwards of 50% of your profit.

All industries have them. All of us are super-consumers of at least something. It’s true. And for very logical reasons.

In this episode, I break down the concept as coined by Eddie Yoon in his book, Superconsumers—and why it matters to your both business and the clients you serve at a strategic level.

Give it a listen and let me know what you think.

Why your new products or services don’t sell

The longer I do education and advisory work, the more I notice how hard—if not impossible—it is to create and sell a new product or service based solely on my own imagination.

And the closer I am to my ideal target market, the easier it is for me to know what to offer.

Why? Because I talk to them. There’s no magic secret there.

If you’re just getting started, optimize for conversations. Reach out to people. See what they are working on. Build or join a community with them.

Try to observe what challenges they have without imposing your ideas on them.

Start with the ideal target market, actually speak to them, deliver a custom solution, then figure out how to productize and communicate it later on.

No matter how smart you are, it rarely works any other way. Not for something new, at least.

Not niched down enough

Do you keep meaning to write for your blog but never get around to it?

And when you do sit down to write something, are you stumped about where to start?

If so, there’s a good chance you’re not niched down enough.

The smaller you focus, the easier the topics will flow.

In fact, all of your marketing will come more easily to you.

Counter-intuitive but true.

Best in the world at what you do

I was listening to the book, Almanac of Navl Ravikant, while doing some yard work today. One line in particular stood out, so I thought I’d share it:

Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

Interestingly, when I was Googling for the tweet to write this, I found the original Tweet from Naval’s now famous Twitter thread, and I noticed I had retweeted this specific tweet a long time ago.

It’s funny how you can read an idea, retweet, and then forget about it entirely. Discovering it twice was fun.

Regardless, it gets me thinking about how we position ourselves.

Could you define yourself in terms that make you best in the world at your particular thing?

What would that definition be? And who would value it?

Too niche or too broad

Mega streaming platform, Twitch, began as Justin.tv—a live 24/7 stream of site co-founder Justin Kan’s daily life.

Obviously, that’s a pretty niche idea with a relatively tiny addressable market. Nonetheless, the idea got Justin and his team featured in all kinds of media outlets for its novelty.

A while later, Justin.tv expanded to allow more creators onto the platform. Eventually, it became open to anyone who wanted to stream.

I don’t recall the specifics, but essentially the platform became somewhat of a nightmare to manage. People were streaming all kinds of unsavoury stuff.

And while the audience was bigger, it still lacked a clear direction and path to monetization.

Looking for the right business model, they noticed video game streamers were a particularly active and engaged audience on the platform.

So, one thing led to another and they decided to go all-in on video game streaming, naming the company Twitch.tv (which became Twitch).

Twitch was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $1 billion and was reportedly valued at $15 billion in 2020, proving that the right niche can be a lucrative strategy.

So what is the moral of the story for you?

If you’re focused on too small of a niche, you’re probably limiting your potential. If you’re focused on serving “anyone”, there’s a good chance you’ll be too broad to be successful. 

The question is whether you start small and expand, or start wide and double down on your best opportunities.

That’s a topic for another day.