Don’t throw away your competitive advantage

This is why there's so many products for designers and developers, honestly it feels like we're a bunch of naval gazing, self-important idiots who never learn to market correctly because we're too afraid to.

My biggest concern with the approach of picking something you have an existing audience with or is in some corner of your wheelhouse is that it leaves a lot of opportunity outside.

Is there not a huge competitive advantage in selling to underserved markets? You may believe market saturation is "bullshit", but it's much harder to get noticed in an already crowded field.

There seems to be two fields of thought on researching and marketing a bootstrapped product:

1) SEO and niche marketing. This is the sort of thing that Rob Walling talks about. Basically the idea is you research through Google keywords that you can rank highly for and build a product around that, regardless of what you yourself are good at. The problem with this is that the internet is full of scumbags and many online audience "niches" are already taken. PPC is extremely competitive as well.

2) Content marketing and "become famous". This is the approach that I think Amy and Ryan Carson recommend. This has a longer path to success, years in some cases, and is highly subject to survivorship bias. To be frank, it's hard to get noticed in our little world unless you're a) an extreme extrovert and b) extremely charismatic and/or c) really lucky.

There's a middle ground that Patrick McKenzie occupies that combines traits of #1 and #2, but also introduces the free radical of underserved markets. Actually, the reason for his success is that he initially started with an underserved market, and then used that to gain SEO knowledge and internet fame to leverage #2 to some extent.

I've emailed with Amy on this regard, her tone has been basically "Well, it works because he's Patrick". I disagree with this sentiment because it sets up a "Golden Calf" mentality that we mere mortals can't follow the same path.

A lot of people enjoyed reading the conversation with Amy:

http://unicornfree.com/2013/difficulties-for-nathan-barrys-a...

It's interesting, since we didn't plan on the transcript being public we talked in a much more transparent way.

As always, happy to answer questions.

These posts are a free masterclass on building an online marketing campaign. I'm not really talking about the content of the posts, though that is relevant. Rather, because Nathan is so open about what's he's doing, you can really understand the reasoning behind each post and he often talks about results in following posts. It's like you can see the construction plans if you look closely enough.

I'm not really his target market but I follow along just to learn how to be a better marketer.

Great read. I often think people sell themselves too short, so it's always good to reinforce not settling and know what your product/software is worth.