The problem is monetizing a small-market product, esp. an online product. If you go the advertising route, you have to get your page views _way_ up to earn anything; you can't do that with just one little server. If you go the subscription route, pricing is really tricky. If you charge just a little, in my personal experience a) most programmers won't pay anything, so you lose most of your market right there, and b) you'll go broke collecting a pittance from the few who will pay.
Why I am building a product with a tiny market
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Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#22Why? Because you don't need to make 1 cent off each tomato sold in USA to be successful. Even taking a cut of every water pump of a certain car is more then enough--for most of us.
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#23i can not say the same about my product http://onetimepost.com/ ... but it only took me a Saturday morning so ... it wasn't like something huge was lost xD
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#24That's one awesome regex debugger!
Going after such a small niche is a great idea as long as you know that the market is big enough to provide good ROI in both percentage and nominal terms.
I don't think the worry from a competitor "adding a feature and crushing you" is a very likely threat. As long as you can stick it out for a few years to build a brand name and continue to keep in front of the indefinite stream of people learning regex you should be fine.
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#25I tend to target niche markets because the odds of me succeeding are much higher. It's much easier to be the best of a small niche and like the article said everything happens on a smaller scale, so less risk. Most the wealthy people I personally know made their money from owning a small niche.
It's easi(er) to own a niche market, but it's also more likely that anyone decently positioned to compete with you can wipe out your profits with small changes to their product or pricing strategy Not all niche markets are small in terms of revenue/cost either: there are product niches worth millions (or even billions) whose actual feasible customer set barely makes it into double digits. But when the niche is that s…
That is true, but something else to focus on: with smaller niches, the learning that takes place is often much higher and faster, and that is invaluable too.
My app is the absolute niche of niche ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pauldavids... ), but I learned A LOT, especially about the official Android publishing process. I don't care if it doesn't get used by many people, because my target market was literally 1 person: my girlfriend.
In addition, the process of making this app was fun. Learning AND fun; a goal that ALL of us here are striving for, right?
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#26I wrote a regex tool a while back: http://regexp.quaxio.com/
It's open source so feel free to "steal" from it :)
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
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Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#28Very cool! Two suggestions: show the examples more prominently (and my add a regex for email, cause it looks cool), and allow people to link to specific regexes.
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#29[deleted]
Re: Why I am building a product with a tiny market
#30The problem is monetizing a small-market product, esp. an online product. If you go the advertising route, you have to get your page views _way_ up to earn anything; you can't do that with just one little server. If you go the subscription route, pricing is really tricky. If you charge just a little, in my personal experience a) most programmers won't pay anything, so you lose most of your market right there, and b)…
It feels like this is the quintessential "feature, not product" startup. The goal of these should be either:
A. to acquire a huge customer base and then pivot into satisfying them with a larger "suite" offering which includes your original service as a feature,
or B. to be acquired by another company with a huge customer base... and then integrate your feature into their suite. :)
I could see, for example, Github buying this (and other things like it) and launching a featureful, language-agnostic online IDE that compiles against Travis-CI.