How I Pick a Niche

Hi Zenith Catcher,

I wish you a great start to 2025! As mentioned in my recent comeback episode on Catch The Zenith, I want to document my personal and business journey in my podcast and newsletter from now on. This is why, for the first time, I want to share an entrepreneurship lesson I’ve learned over the past years in this newsletter. Enjoy!

When starting a business, we must choose which niche/target group/market we want to serve. This is the baseline for everything that follows.

Back in 2022, when I started a coaching business where I helped adults with ADHD to turn ADHD into a superpower, I didn’t really know how I should approach choosing a niche.

At that time, I invested in a course that helped me build my own coaching biz, and they taught us to scratch our own itch. A fancy expression to start with your own problem you solved in the past. And this is what I’ve done.

I thought about the challenges I had solved in the past. In my case, I was diagnosed with ADHD/ADD in 2019 and overcame all the negatives and turned ADHD into a strength. Plus, I thought I was pretty good at productivity-related topics (e.g., time management, systems, and routines). Fast forward, I concluded that it makes sense to pick the niche of adults with ADHD. I wanted to help them with a holistic course to turn their ADHD into a superpower. Not the best idea, as it turned out later.

After launching my Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and gathering valuable feedback from my first 5ish customers, I found a helpful framework by Alex Hormozi to help me decide which niche to serve. I wished I had known about it earlier.

He writes that to build a successful biz, your target customer or market needs to have these 4 characteristics:

1. They are in huge pain
2. They have the purchasing power
3. They are easy to target
4. They are in a growing market

At the point of launching my MVP coaching program, I missed one check box.

A) ADHDers are in huge pain since they are distractable, impulsive, and hyperactive;

B) They are easy to target since there are many ADHD influencers online with millions of followers whom I could contact via Instagram DMs.

C) The ADHD market is growing rapidly since more and more adults are getting diagnosed.

D) However, I missed that many ADHDers don’t have the purchasing power (obviously, there are many exceptions, and many ADHDers are multi-billionaires like Richard Branson, Steven Bartlett, Ingvar Kamprad, or Bill Gates) since their struggles led to less economic success.

Nevertheless, I managed to get my first 3 customers within the first 30 days of launching the business and made CHF 5.5k in revenue. The reason for that was I worked hard and did my Instagram DM outreaches every day, interacted in ADHD Facebook groups to book sales calls, and posted 7 days per week content on IG and FB. So even in a niche with individuals with less money available on average, it can work if you put in the reps. You will eventually find someone with money. However, I thought I could do better.

So, I created a 2nd version of my coaching program where I stopped trying to do everything for every ADHDer. Because with my MVP, I tried to do everything for everybody with ADHD. I thought a holistic approach was the solution to get them great results. Bad decision. I wanted to overdeliver like crazy and created too many videos about too many topics to improve their life with ADHD. So, my clients ended up being overwhelmed (obviously no bueno since ADHDers are, by nature, quickly overwhelmed).

So, I started to revise my coaching program using the book $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi as a baseline. I sat every morning for months for 5-6 hours straight to create this new, better program before working on university stuff.

I also made a conscious decision that from now on, I would not serve all adults with ADHD; I just want those who struggle with productivity topics. Think procrastination, low motivation, bad time management, distractability, and inconsistency. More precisely, everybody who joins will work on one huge procrastinated project. One client, for instance, got her PhD thesis done, and another one launched his business. I called the program Productivity Powerhouse (btw, I created a free Google Doc with all the videos I recorded since I’m now working on a software business and no longer coach ADHDers. Enjoy!).

This new focus was a great decision. I created a much more concise program called Productivity Powerhouse. Less content, shorter videos, and more individualized work for them, like creating a step-by-step plan to complete their postponed project.

This led to way better results, and customers started to recommend me to their friends. Which was a great indicator that I was on the right track and had “product-market fit.” However, one thing I didn’t solve entirely. The lack of purchasing power.

So, I analyzed the top 10% of clients who achieved the best results by far. I identified that my best clients had three things in common:

1. They were easy to work with. When they bought the program, they just told me to send them the payment link (stripe link), and they paid immediately.
2. Almost everything I taught them in terms of productivity strategies they implemented. They were doers and wanted to change.
3. They were already high performers. One client was a strategy consultant at Siemens, and another was an executive at a software startup.

So, I decided to keep the narrow focus on productivity topics with my program, but from now on, I will solely focus on this niche: high performers with ADHD.

Now, I have checked off all four boxes that I previously outlined. In other words, they had the missing purchasing power.

Learnings & New Startup

These experiences taught me two things. First, conduct as many customer interviews as possible and do as much market research as possible before picking a niche to ensure you don’t miss one checkbox. Second, the B2C market is quite painful since you deal with lower-ticket products. As my entrepreneurship professor at the University of St. Gallen used to say, “In B2B is where the gold lies.”

With these learnings in my pocket, I’m now working on a new business. For the first time, I wanna build a Software-as-a-Service business. A completely new challenge for me. However, I believe this is the next logical step after running two coaching/consulting businesses and one market agency.

Thus far, we have conducted over 50 interviews for the new software business idea, and we’re now in the B2B space. And, at least, this is what I believe; the market we wanna serve (private equity companies) checks all 4 boxes. Once we have our first customers, I will let you guys know if I was right.

I hope by sharing today’s story, you can do better and pick the right niche when starting a new business. Thanks for reading and let’s make 2025 a great success!

Nicola

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This week on the Catch The Zenith Podcast:

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Inspiring Things This Week:

Gadget: I travel a lot, and I used to struggle with adapters that didn’t quite meet all my needs. I needed something that could both power my devices and charge them via USB-C and USB-A. Then I came across this international adapter that can plug into just about any outlet, and it’s made my life so much easier.

Podcasts: Two people who are among the individuals who had a major impact on my self-improvement journey are psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman. Recently, they had a fascinating discussion on the Huberman Lab Podcast. One major takeaway I got from it is that sometimes the best conversations happen when we speak the truth and state the facts, regardless of anxiety or consequences. It’s a real adventure, so to speak. Click here to watch.

Quote of the Week:

– Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning

Video Recommendations:

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