Defining a market to sell to

I make web development tutorial content for a site called web-crunch.com. That content gets distributed to YouTube.

For a year or two I built a small following in a niched market of Ruby on Rails developers. I only ever entered this market because I decided to publish what I learned publicly. I stumbled into it all by accident.

Some time later after riding wave and influx of subscribers I was able to capitalize on the audience I built with a course called Hello Rails. It was my first substancial success with building and selling something online.

Staying on course

Recently, I took a 4 month long hiatus from producing content. I suffered from burn out and ultimately wanted my time back.

I brainstormed if it was worth continuing to serve a market where I’m more of an outlier. I have to assume being a product designer by trade doesn’t always give Ruby/Rails developers enough trust in me. I can understand that if you want to learn from the best.

While it’s tempting to build products outside of the niche I’m recognized in, that means I need to basically start over in some regard. Having an audience isn’t everything but when it comes to content, it’s pretty necessary. I do plan to serve other markets but I already have validation from this one. Defining this market was an accident but to remove myself from it is a mistake.

My hope is to keep serving the market I’m targeting with a new up and coming SaaS project. The goal with it is to help Ruby on Rails developers move more swiftly as they create and scale new apps.

While building this project I plan to keep creating content on my blog and YouTube channel to help scale the audience and compound returns later on. Over time I hope to build a little side business I’m passionate about working on and one people value.

I’m excited for what lies ahead. I just hope the minimal time I have allows me to get there as soon as possible.