Don't search for your niche, have others find your niche for you!

I had a fascinating conversation today, that confirmed some previous experiences. If you search for a niche, chances are, you won't get far because you lack domain knowledge and experience. If you, on the other hand, talk to people in different fields that all face different problems, you can benefit from that.

At the time I’m typing these words, less than one hour ago, I met up with an old friend from school. We hadn’t met since graduation, and then again randomly at a business event not long ago. Having some common ground now, we decided to keep in touch and eventually saw each other today.

He's not in the tech/software field, which makes him naturally interesting for me. Those are people I think I can learn the most from. We talked about our experiences and I told him about my current projects. It was a great opportunity for me to learn from someone outside my field and gain a different perspective.

After ending a contract with a previous partner, he explored drop-shipping a bit more and realized how big this field was. I, likewise, was a bit overwhelmed by the fact that people make big cash by essentially brute forcing designs. They have a bulk of images, some template text and then want to offer them online. If no one buys it, they didn't make an investment. If they, however, make a few sales, that's great. The effort is rather minimal, but some tasks along the way become tedious.

That's when my eyes usually light up. A very repetitive task that lots of people have. I asked whether he was using any form of software to ease this process. He apparently made a lot of research and settled on some half-baked desktop app that's setting him back $600/m.

It's an easy task. Bulk process data, connect to a few websites and push it there. Throw in some more common sense to make the UX not horrible. Right?

Do you know where this desktop app was being sold? You won't believe it. It's being sold on Etsy! A great example of selling where your potential customers are. I didn't know that you could sell software on Etsy, but that's beside the point.

We have been talking about creating a real world software application on both Discord and the Twitch streams. I think this makes for a great one. Whether it will eventually bring in money doesn't really matter to me at this point. I'm more interested in developing something commercially relevant for the Full Cycle Dev community to learn from.

This would probably not be an open source code base, but most things would be developed on stream and community members can ask all sorts of questions and engage. Let us know if you care!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/_mbrayerYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3XQw149GcyW0nIQ0S3_UGwDiscord: https://discord.gg/fUxexgvD4CTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/dacx