Hi Reader,

There's an expression in the business world of trying to "boil the ocean". It's something that you might have heard us talking about before...

It's a phrase that we heard at the start of our business journey with our proptech start-up Doormarked.

We didn't understand the importance of what it meant until it was a little bit too late which is why we are sharing this story with you today - you don't need to make the same mistake or waste time like we did initially.

We were discussing our business idea with a panel of experts working for an incubator....

We were explaining that as a platform we helped our customers to buy, sell or invest in UK property.

The question that was quickly fired back at us was "which one is it?"

We replied.... what do you mean?

They explained that we can't help everyone, at least not initially. They said it sounded like we were trying to "boil the ocean" and strongly advised that we focused on a specific customer type rather than trying to help the 3 different ones we were currently targeting (buyers, sellers AND investors).

It felt like a low blow at the time because we had spent hours, days & weeks refining our offering, designing our website & writing our copy accordingly to target these 3 different customer types.

The truth is in hindsight we wish we had taken their advice. This is why.....

By trying to attract all 3 different customer types we were making life so much harder for ourselves for 2 key reasons:

• REASON ONE: We were having to divide our marketing budget into 3 to cover all 3 of these different "types of customer" and create 3 different marketing campaigns for each one - as an early stage start up it would have been much more efficient to invest our resources (time & money) on a single customer type initially & establish a marketing funnel with that one customer type that converted before going on to target the other customer types.
• REASON TWO: We were making it much harder for ourselves to convert a potential customer landing on our business.... It wasn't immediately obvious to a specific user type landing on our website that our business would help them. The message we were sharing was "if you're one of these 3 different types of people then we can help you" when instead our message should have been so clear for our intended user that the moment they landed on our website they knew that our site would be able to help them - it should have been designed specifically for them. Instead we were asking our customers to do so much work to figure out if we were a right fit for them and this was likely costing us customers!

The importance of having a niche where you serve a very specific customer type cannot be under-estimated.

It means you can much more efficiently & effectively target your potential customers & maximise your chances of actually converting them into paying customers.

How can we be so certain that defining a niche helps improve traction in this way?

Aside from our own experience with Doormarked (where our traction started to improve the moment we focused our offering on helping buyers only) there are a number of examples in the real world of huge businesses starting with a clear niche.

We've also got some undeniable evidence from our own social media pages (it's arguably even more important to have a defined niche on social media). We will be discussing these businesses & sharing our social media evidence in this week's edition of The Business Manual as well as giving readers our top tip to helping you find your niche. Click here if you want to read along.

We hope you have found this week's email helpful - please forward it on to a friend if you think they will find it useful!

See you next week,

Elle & Lawrence

P.S Any time you need more help there are 3 ways we can help you....

1. FREE - Take a look at our Instagram (making sure to read the captions) where we share our learnings about all things related to starting a business & marketing it on social media. You can find our account here. You can also browse our resources including our blog & guides to download on our website which step you through various aspects of starting a business. Here's a link to our website.

2. 1:1 SERVICES including coaching & social media content creation - We've recently had some more availability to take on additional clients. We offer various services to help other existing or aspiring business owners. These including our 1:1 consultations or coaching where we can review business ideas, marketing plans or social media strategy as examples. We also work with clients to design them their very own social media content or websites - please send us an email if you would like to learn more.

3. The Business Manual (£20/month) - We will be launching as of April a special type of email where we breakdown a specific topic to help aspiring & new business owners. It will be a 10 minute read every 2 weeks where we will be covering breakdowns on specific subjects such as ordering stock, marketing strategies, step-by-step content creation & so much more all based of real life examples from our own businesses. The reason for this paid newsletter? It keeps our weekly emails totally free of annoying sponsors & it means as our capacity to work with others 1:1 gets stretched, we can still provide very specific help as time & cost effectively as possible for us & you! Click here if you don't want to miss an edition of The Business Manual (you can read old editions too).​