Day 10: First Attempt at Finding the Niche

Today I found a website called www.shopster.com.  Check out this video to see what they are all about.  Basically it's a network for suppliers to meet sellers.  You can use it to set up an online store, and pick the items you want to sell from searching through the suppliers.  Very cool site, I may use it.

I thought of a product today.  It's a site that makes CD creation and duplication easy for artists.  The idea is that an artist or band would get on the site, they would then be able to choose the type of package they want their CD to be in, they could upload their cover art, and any booklet they want to create, and then they would be able to upload their tracks and have it all created and sent to them.  If the band doesn't have any album art works, or doesn't know what they want, there would be templates they could work with and an easy to use customization feature so they can get the look they want.  There are sites that do similar things to this, such as www.discmakers.com and www.nationwidedisc.com, but after navigating their site I noticed that they were both frustrating to use, and didn't offer a creation feature on the website.  If you wanted to create designs from scratch you had to call them, or work on it offline, and then upload it again.  There would be some other niche things I could put into the site to make it more user friendly and convenient.  As we talked about yesterday, alleviate the pain of CD duplication.

This brings me to a point that I've been considering since my call to my sister Heidi.  After telling me the downfalls of the organic baby clothing market, she did offer some wisdom on differentiation.  She said that I could do the organic clothing, so long as I differentiated myself enough.  She said that JC Penny was late on the scene when he first started, but he differentiated his stores and in essence "found his niche".  Now I'm not returning to the organic baby clothing idea, but she does make a valid point that I need to consider.  Even if other people are doing things similar, what can I do to differentiate myself and better serve my niche?  This also runs me into a blurry line, because in order for me to "set it and forget it" my market can't be too saturated, or I'll be spending all my time on better marketing, and constantly having to "maintain" the business.  Well, its food for thought anyway.

Some problems I foresee with this website is that it could have large upfront costs to create the website, and that I'll have to find a drop ship manufacturer that does CD duplication, prints booklets and covers, and produces sleeves and jewell cases.  I'm sure such a place exists, I'm just throwing out potential pitfalls.  Websites can cost a surprising amount, especially if they are information based (which this one is not)  Here is an example of a website you've probably never heard of, but cost $1.9 million to make, and was much less research intensive than a website like imdb.  Something like my idea won't cost but a couple thousand I imagine, but still thats a lot.

Peace of Schmidt:
What did one snowman say to the other snowman?...Smells like carrots.