(If you already have niches in mind, or already have selected your products, it’s possible to skip this chapter. But I’d still recommend reading through this to get related potential niches that you can either expand into or pivot from your original one.)
A niche is a subset of a market. There can be many levels of niche. For example, “gemstone jewelry” is a niche in the jewelry category. And if you want to make it even more specific, or “niche down”, then you can get a ‘sub-niche’ like “gemstone necklace made with sterling silver”.
The more you niche down, the fewer competitors there will be, and the less competition you will face.
This is the starting point of our market research journey. I’ll run through how to generate niche ideas and how to narrow them down to analyse them further in the next chapters. Here are some of the places you can find potential niches:
Think about your hobbies, skills and knowledge. A lot of passions and skills may not seem ‘sellable’ at first, but can be turned into unique products. For example, if you’re into hiking, it can be used to make journals made for hikers with information like hiking trail log book. Another example is that if you are into beauty, then some potential niche ideas could be natural skincare products or printables like skincare labels and beauty routine cards.
These advantages can be internal (your own heritage, culture, etc) or external (your location, etc). For example, if you are part of an ethnic group, making products that are relating to that could be your advantage. Another example would be that if you live where high quality timber is abundant, then you may have a cost advantage of crafting solid wood decor.
Home page, gift ideas and shopping guide in the Etsy blog are just few of the pages to find inspirations.
Sometimes it’s good to just searching for random products on Etsy. Click around, see the related products, browse shoppers’ collections, explore related search queries to get more product ideas.
Similarly, you can browse social media for inspirations. I especially love browsing Pinterest and Instagram. Explore hashtags, browse the popular/trending pages, look for brands that your friends interact with, etc.
Marketplaces like Amazon Handmade and eBay can give you tons of inspirations of niches you haven't thought about.
To record the potential niches, I’d recommend using your favourite note-taking methods to mark down the ideas. My go-to is using a note-taking app like Apple note or Google doc, but you can write them down with pen and paper if you prefer.
After this process, you may have ended up with too many potential niches, as you’d need to analyse them in the next few steps. I’d recommend bringing about 10-15 to the next steps.
If you have too many, here are some ways to narrow them down preliminarily:
Once you have the initial list of potential niches, it’s a good idea to come up with 2 keywords to represent each niche because you’ll use those keywords to do the analysis.
Here are the 2 types of keywords to use:
This keyword represents your broad niche. Note that this keyword shouldn’t be too broad. For example, “label template”, "birthday card" and “gemstone jewelry” are good examples, and “template”, "card" or “jewelry” would be too broad and doesn’t represent your potential niche.
This is the keyword describes a bit more of what you want to sell. For example, “soap bottle label template”, "funny birthday card" and “rose quartz bracelet” are good choices for this level.
Mark down all the keywords and you’ll use them for our demand & competition level research for the next chapters.