Avenger Penguin

In my attempt to catch up with the 12 week challenge, I have spent the last couple of days looking over the details of Week 1 and I believe I can say I have now completed that stage.

The post on the first week of the challenge has lots of helpful advice, but I believe the actions required boil down to:

1. WHAT: Decide what you will do to achieve location independence. Generally, since anyone will have to create or grow an income stream, this step involves deciding what that stream will be.
2. WHOM: Choose a niche at which to target your idea. This is advice I read time and time again for people starting out solo.
3. WHERE: List what channels there are to communicate to this niche. This can be online and offline channels.
4. HOW: Come up with some idea on how the product will be offered initially. Any business will, of course, offer premium, mid-range and budget packages, but for the purposes of getting started, the real focus is on what will be available first.

What do?

Whilst I do have a large handful of projects on the go, the spirit of the 12 Week Challenge is to focus on one idea and run it through the gauntlet. Thus the effort here, for me, was not in "what shall I do?" but in "which shall I do?"

To answer this, I began by creating the diagram which is now crammed in on the right. I assure that the version I have is perfectly readable, but this at least illustrates the large number of things I want to complete and interlink. With this, a process of elimination brought up web development, design and consultancy as the more commercially viable route.

More specifically, there is a system I've been prototyping for a while now that aims to provide website, intranet, task management, user management and many other things useful to businesses. My aim with it is to develop an all-in-one setup for smaller companies and sole traders to rent as a service (and thus cut overheads) without any need for in-house IT knowledge or skills. It could be said that this system would rival the likes of MS Exchange and MS Sharepoint, but is built from tying together several open source applications.

The benefits of such a system would be far greater flexibility and no financial costs from licencing. My prototype is working on centralised authentication and templating so that the final product will behave as a wholly-contained system.

I won't go so much into the technical aspects and save that for a technical post another time. What I do have at this point is something I'm keen to have as a candidate for this challenge.

Whom do?

This is a step with which I had some psychological difficulties. Namely, I found it very hard to convince myself that focusing on a very specific niche is worth seemingly "missing out" on other potential customers. I found it easiest to rationalise it by telling myself:

1. The odds of prospect becoming a customer are much higher if you come across as specialising in what they need. If their decision is between you and a generic competitor, you have big points in your favour by mentioning their niche. This might not only be helpful but might even be a necessity if you're to outweigh the points you lost by being new and unknown.
2. Specialising does not mean you actively exclude other markets, but you just won't be targeting them. If someone from another market or niche approaches and asks if you can provide similar services, you don't have to turn it down. In fact, I am likely to advertise the generic service on my professional website whilst simultaneously appealing to my niche on a specialised website.
3. This is not a permanent decision. If the business doesn't take off so well in one niche, you can sidestep to another. Also, if it does go well and you've built a name, you can consider using that name to spread to other niches.

So, now I've calmed myself from potential panic attacks over customers outside the niche I might be turning away, I can think about what that niche would be.

I considered professionals in service sectors such as accountants, psychologists or sales. These sounded like ideal businesses as prospects for a complete IT infrastructure solution. These each need to track billable services, invoicing and customer relationship management. However, these still aren't very tightly defined niches as such and there was an underlying feeling that I'd have something of an uphill battle to convince people to switch over from IT infrastructure they already have.

Another consideration I had was for much more independent sole traders. I know several people (and a great many more if I include two degrees of separation) who independently produce hand-made clothing, jewellery and other items. These are people less likely to have a whole IT infrastructure in place. However, a large problem here is that I am incredulous that they would need a full setup to the level of tracking invoices, orders and employees. In fact I would go as far to say most people trading hand-made wares would consider such a thing to be overkill.

It was fast approaching midnight and here I was with one set of niches that would be hard to crack and another set of niches with which I had better links, but probably wouldn't actually want my product. Lots of brainstorming and whiteboarding got me little progress until I stepped back away from the problem.

I read over the post on week 1 again and reviewed my action list above. I noticed something interesting about item #4, deciding on what will be offered to customers initially. The article phrases it in this manner:

Decide what your initial offering will be to your audience; ultimately you’ll want to consider a product portfolio which has offers at different price points (low, medium & high) but for the 12 Week Challenge, you just need to decide upon (and later create!) the first offering you’d like to sell.

It was at this point I was struck by a realisation I'd been jumping several guns at once. I was obsessing over finding a niche that would want all the features of my business IT system, but in reality only the the top-level "gold" customers ever want the full package of any service or product. As task #4 points out, you need to focus on what will be on offer to the first few customers.

By this point it was 1am, but I'd had the spark I needed to form an overall strategy. One component of any IT system that covers several business needs will be a Content Management System to the run the website. Given that the niches of independent sole traders will most likely require a website at least, I can trim back my product to focus on just acting as such.

This means if I set my initial offering to be little more than standard freelance web development, but with a custom CMS, then this is a service even very small operations would still buy into. With the right design, this CMS system can grow in a modular manner to be the full IT infrastructure product I want it to be.

So, to conlude task #2 with a final answer: I will be targeting new and small independent operations that produce their own product. I will have to focus more than that, but I think I'll save giving away that detail until a later date.

Where do?

Identifying where I can infiltrate channels for my niche should be a relatively small job if I'm choosing niches in which I have direct or indirect contact. This follows easily from the previous discussion of choosing a niche that fits that requirement.

How do?

As I said above, I've trimmed my intended initial offering down to a basic website and CMS setup that will be extensible to include other business tools as I incorporate them. This has several benefits:

1. I can happily target the aforementioned niches of sole traders of hand-produced goods with a product that is initially just a website package.
2. There may be scope later to up-sell existing customers to use the new components as I create them.
3. If my market niche does not have a need for the more advanced back office tools, I could have a strong enough footing with the product to sell it to other markets.
4. I will save a lot of time if I only have to assemble a simple CMS at the start. The ability to work on new aspects to the product whilst selling the older versions to people will allow me to sustain growth of the venture for some time. This is more desirable than having to take 3-6 months out from my life to assemble a prototype with all the bells and whistles that still may not be bought by anyone.

So, overall the plan is to keep it simple and focus just on the niche I choose. Complexity can come later and if the idea fails, then I've not spent half a year working on something that I ultimately feel was a waste of that time.

Week 2 of the challenge seems to involve getting more of a plan in writing. I hope to report on progress on that this Sunday.