Bealers.com

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Pick a niche in three steps

All notes, by stage

February 2015, a team meeting where we stopped making PHP apps for anyone who asked. The new rule: solve one particular pain for one particular type of person, and talk to them about it, not rattle off technologies. The three steps are from Brennan Dunn.

1. Catalogue what you've already solved

Every problem you've fixed for someone, not every technology you've used.

For us it was taking over an existing PHP application and making it safe. So no greenfield builds and no CMS sites.

2. Pick the one you can prove

Choose the problem you have the best case study for, and describe the person who has it. We had three:

  • A founder or micro business whose standalone PHP app is the business. Probably a financial side to it, not high-traffic e-commerce. They use a freelancer or agency and service is slipping, or the supplier has gone dark. Or they built it themselves and have hit the limit of what they can do.
  • A CTO or IT manager at a small or medium business with web assets big enough to need ongoing work but no one inside to look after them. The internal IT team probably ignores the web side.
  • A freelancer or agency with a client whose application is well outside their comfort zone.

3. Say the benefit in the buyer's words

Then write the "do any of these sound familiar?" list:

  • You're responsible for an application that earns money, and you don't trust it.
  • There's no plan for a developer leaving suddenly, or a server going down.
  • Every new feature is a painful, ad-hoc process.
  • Your supplier takes days to make a simple change.
  • Your developer went snowboarding and never came back.
  • Availability is measured in eights, not nines.
  • Support costs are unpredictable.
  • You're ready to change developer but have no plan for the handover.

And one sentence of offer: we help you protect your bespoke, revenue-generating PHP application with a predictable-cost, rapid move to a more stable, maintainable state.

Then the plan was the unglamorous part: manage with what we had, see how we converted, onboarded and supported, and only iterate once that was nailed.

Comes after choosing an audience and before a positioning statement.

Linked from (4)