Seth Godin is such an icon in the online/blogging/marketing world that I’m always shocked when I mention him in the real world (even to small business owners) and get blank stares.
If you don’t know Seth and you’re interested in starting a business or making your existing one better, do yourself a gigantic favor and check out his books and ebooks (a lot of them are free). He’s got a great blog too, but for me it took reading a few of his books before I started to really “get” the blog.
Anyway, I went to a small workshop (100 people or so) hosted by Seth a few weekends ago in New York City. It was the most expensive seminar I’ve ever gone to, but it was more than worth it.
I took way too many insights from the weekend to fit them all into a blog post, but I wanted to highlight here one of the most interesting and immediately applicable ideas we talked about. It’s particularly helpful if you’re just starting out and trying to choose a niche for your business.
Using axes to choose your niche
This technique one that Seth said is a favorite of consultants, so I’m sure it’s not a totally new idea. But I had never heard it before, and it really got some wheels turning for me.
I once heard Brian Clark explain the “crossroads” technique as one proven way to choose a niche, and after that, I started to notice just how common it was in the blogosphere. It’s simple: you take two mostly-unrelated topics and explore their intersection. My buddy Steve Kamb did this with his site, Nerd Fitness, mashing up nerdy, superhero/gamer/movie culture with fitness. And it’s what I did when I started No Meat Athlete, though I admit I didn’t realize it at the time that I was following a formula.
Seth’s idea (which I’m calling “axes,” for lack of a better name), is a generalization of this. Here’s how it works.
Take out a piece of paper and draw a set of axes (a vertical line and a horizontal line) so that you have four quadrants. Each quadrant represents a niche within the market; the tricky part — and indeed, the point — is choosing the labels for the axes.
Here’s the example Seth used: Imagine you want to open a haircut place, and consider the labels “expensive/cheap” for one axis, “long/short wait” for the other. So you’ve got a lot of places clustered in the “expensive and long wait” quadrant — the fancy shops, like Bumble and Bumble. Diagonal from that one is the “cheap and short wait” quadrant, where you find the Hair Cuttery, Great Clips, and other places where you can walk right in and get a passable haircut for 12 bucks.
This situation of having all the brands in a market clustered in two diagonally-opposed quadrants is often the case. For a given business, position along one axis seems to dictate position along the other one, so you end up with two clusters, or perhaps a cloud that includes the in-between businesses (moderately-priced haircut places will tend to have moderate wait times).
Cheap goes with short wait. Expensive goes with long wait. Because who would think of charging 100 bucks for a walk-in haircut?
That empty quadrant, it turns out, is the opportunity.
Might there be a market for super-expensive, walk-in haircuts? Maybe in New York City, for successful but incredibly busy corporate women?
The other quadrant, “cheap with a long wait,” seems far less appealing. When I asked Seth how you tell which quadrants are good opportunities and which are vacant for a reason, his explanation was essentially, “That’s the art of it.”
So go do the art!
And that was another theme of the weekend, and indeed of Seth’s body of work: there’s no formula telling you exactly how to do work that matters (which Seth calls art, even when it’s business).
If starting a successful business (or adapting an existing one to become remarkable) were as simple as making some dots on a set of axes with pre-defined labels, everyone could (and would) do it. But guess what? Then all the businesses would be clustered together in the same boring quadrants, splitting up the profits of a finite pie, until someone comes along and thinks up some new labels and a new way to look at the market. And creates a brand new pie.
More simply: as soon as there’s a formula, the formula stops working. Stop looking for a system, and instead give yourself permission to mess up, learn, and mess up some more, until one day it works.