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Start with a Niche

109 points| tablet | 5 years ago |fibery.io | reply

38 comments

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[+] jimnotgym|5 years ago|reply
I read the homepage and I don't know what fibery does. Am I an idiot, because this seems to happen tho me a lot with modern saas?
[+] CharlesW|5 years ago|reply
I read this and thought you must be an idiot. Then I read their front page and now think I must also be an idiot.

Reading deep into https://fibery.io/about-us, it seems like they're a Notion competitor.

[+] tobyjsullivan|5 years ago|reply
You might not be the only one. There's literally a button on the homepage labelled "I don't get it, explain it differently."

It's effectively a user-friendly database at the end of the day. I used it to plan my wedding and I love it.

[+] ozten|5 years ago|reply
Agreed. I find their footer very confusing. It made me think that the site is a spoof on SV culture.

Links: Anxiety, Build, Connect, Freedom

Clicking Anxiety,

The page is broken up into the sections: Try, Suffer, and Quit...

The footer on that page says...

* Being Self-centered * Boring * Really contact us? * WFH * They Suspended Trump

The work of a funny intern or ?

[+] oliv__|5 years ago|reply
Not only that but the fricking scroll and visual effects almost crashed my browser
[+] nonameiguess|5 years ago|reply
Just from looking at the diagrams, I'm guessing a competitor to Atlassian/Gitlab/Azure DevOps suites, but seemingly minus the git server and binary artifact repositories (which Atlassian also doesn't offer). So Wiki with diagramming tools and something like scrum or kanban boards. A persistent digital whiteboard, basically.

Looks like they also have CRM, but to be honest, I've never understood what that even is.

[+] nwienert|5 years ago|reply
Fibery is like the penultimate example of not starting with a niche, which makes this article quite funny. They are the anti-niche, and further, defining a niche as focusing on a specific size of company is also an inversion of what most would call a niche...

They had a unique opportunity here to write an article “don’t start with a niche”, but I don’t know if they have the success yet to prove it.

[+] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
Culture wars show up in the blogs, unless the blogs are done by C-level individuals.
[+] jp57|5 years ago|reply
Hasn't this ground already been covered in Crossing the Chasm[1]? I.e. that in order to move your marketing from early adopters to the early majority pragmatists you need to build an integrated solution for a specific problem. E.g. the Mac and desktop publishing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

[+] purerandomness|5 years ago|reply
Everything has already been covered by ancient greek philosophers.

That's not a reason to stop sharing insights. They might be useful to someone in a way only you can rephrase them.

[+] jabo|5 years ago|reply
> The niche we choose was product companies from 20 to 200 people.

This is still pretty broad for it to be a niche IMO.

[+] ozten|5 years ago|reply
+1 that is demographic data, not a niche.

A niche is creating a product management tool targeted at SaaS companies building digital marketing tools.

[+] tablet|5 years ago|reply
How you’d narrow it? We tried post-seed Saas product companies but it seems no need to do that since it doesn’t has enough differences to justify the shrink
[+] ngokevin|5 years ago|reply
I enjoyed looking for niches in the VR industry previously, coming up with several prototypes and probing for users through Reddit DMs. Was able to get some starting sales that way.

I'm doing it for language learning, with the niche of couples, with myself as a user included. I re-read Crossing the Chasm a lot which covers starting with a beachhead, gathering your troops, and planning D-Day onto the market.

[+] trestenhortz|5 years ago|reply
I agree with “Start with a niche”, but pretty much all of the examples given aren’t niche products..,, they were some of the most revolutionary products in history. I’m just saying they don’t really illustrate the concept of a “niche start”.
[+] carabiner|5 years ago|reply
I guess a better headline would be "Start with a killer application." For aviation it might have been USPS delivering mail by air. Levi's making jeans for miners.
[+] ngokevin|5 years ago|reply
What are some of the ultimate examples? FB with colleges for sure. Amazon with book sales. Slack used to be for a gaming company? Discord from gaming to general online communites. Twitch from justin to gaming to now just streaming. Airbnb from air beds for conference events.
[+] skeeter2020|5 years ago|reply
The visicalc niche may seem obvious and big now but the venn diagram of accountants who owned home computers and wanted to do their work on them was not that big 40+ years ago
[+] user-the-name|5 years ago|reply
> Radio (1895)

> VisiCalc (Excel predecessor, 1979)

> Facebook (2004)

This is an... interesting version of technological innovation history.

[+] trestenhortz|5 years ago|reply
“Excel predecessor”. Harsh description of the invention of spreadsheet software.
[+] moosebear847|5 years ago|reply
This article makes me feel misled. Doesn't niche as applied here apply to everything from the wheel to soap?

Fake examples: The general needed a wheel to move his cargo, so when he had the wheel invented, now the wheel was from an army niche. The king didn't want poop on his hands like a pleb, so he got someone to invent soap for him. Boom, the soap came from the niche of kings. Someone who needed to walk far, invented shoes. Boom, the niche for shoes was far walkers.

[+] mathgladiator|5 years ago|reply
So, I like the idea and I'm starting with a Niche: board games! Yes, that's right, it's me pimping my programming language for board games which I really need to work on more

http://www.adama-lang.org/

I see a lot of potential outside of my space since I'm operating at the level of a document + atomic transactions + workflow, so I may have something more broadly applicable. However, the burden rests with me to paint the picture for how that could work.

[+] Bakary|5 years ago|reply
I can't tell if the rest of the website is a parody or not. Or perhaps that is an essential element of a successful parody of the modern economy?
[+] zkmon|5 years ago|reply
All of the tech mentioned are broadly in the same domain - connecting people together or connecting people with information. This domain has saturated now. In fact there are no more niche areas untouched. All innovation now is about quality and economy. It just boils down to biggest bang for the buck.
[+] 3stripe|5 years ago|reply
Remember it's a French word, not something that rhymes with "itch" ;)