As for targeting niche markets… as a start-up you won’t survive if you don’t sell quickly and profitably, so you need a market that is easily addressable, that needs your solution right now, that has money and that is willing to take a calculated risk working with a smaller player. These markets are almost always under the radar and therefore smaller than $100M. So often the winning strategy (as described in Crossing the Chasm) is to first focus and quickly dominate a small very profitable niche (e.g. $10-50M) then jump to the next logical niches until you dominate a whole sector and can hold your own against the big players.

In our case, the first niche we’ll target are the 3D artists in the game and film industries. We are well known in that industry and we have a mailing list of more than 13,000 individuals covering most of the studios that use and trust our past products already. We’ll allow these artists to create new 3D models a hundred times faster and cheaper than alternative solutions.

BTW, good work with your blog!

Christian Laforte,
President, Feeling Software