A stubborn thought I can’t shake:
“I must land more clients. Quickly.”
Business has been a wild ride for the past three years. I went after overseas clients during wartime. I was suffering from depression, and my savings were running out.
“I must find a niche. Fast.”
I’m 35, wanting to start a family and build something stable. A wife, three or four kids, a large green yard, you know. Maybe a dog too.
“Do your research, John, and launch the ads already.”
It worked before. Problem is, niches can seem attractive from the outside. But you only find out if a niche is viable once you try to land clients and get results for them.
A niche looking good on paper doesn’t mean it’s validated
In August, I advertised to land off-plan construction developers in the UK. It seemed like a good niche. Developers sell expensive units, and a qualified buyer could be worth a lot of money. What’s more, I successfully advertised for a client in a similar niche.
I thought sales would be fairly easy.
My service — Meta ads plus phone qualification — seemed naturally a good fit.
But I hadn’t realized (and this should have been part of my research prior to launching my ads) that off-plan developers don’t buy the type of service I sell. I couldn’t find any direct competitors when I searched using Google and the Meta Ad Library.
Across the US and UK, searches around developer leads and performance marketing returned zero results. “Real estate development leads” returned 0 active US results. “International property buyers” produced only 3 UK and 5 US results, mostly B2C.
The marketing agencies that did appear sold CGI, visualization, branding, websites, films and other creative services. None of them sold lead generation or appointment-setting services.
“No competition” could be a bad thing
I knew it wasn’t a blue ocean.
But I kept thinking, “You know what, maybe no one else is targeting off-plan developers because they haven’t even considered it.”
I couldn’t prove it from research alone. I had to test and advertise. After a few days with no signal, I realized I was targeting the wrong niche, even though my budget was tight. You don’t need thousands of dollars to validate an offering using ads. A few hundred bucks will do — if you structure the test correctly.
Essentially, I was looking for businesses saying some variation of:
“Property developers: we’ll bring you qualified buyers.”
I couldn’t find them.
Later, I researched the “investor acquisition” niche and almost immediately found the right messaging from competitors:
“We Don’t Generate Leads. We Book Investor Calls.”
“Accredited investors on your calendar.”
“Qualified investor pipelines.”
It was a sharp contrast. No doubt about it. And it changed my interpretation of “competition” in the context of market research: relevant competitors can be evidence, not just threats.
Every market has two sides
When I realized I was wrong, I quickly researched a new niche.
I came up with “investor acquisition.”
In the US, research revealed two separate Meta ecosystems.
On one side were service providers selling investor acquisition to sponsors and fund managers. On the other were sponsors and issuers themselves advertising investment opportunities to accredited investors. That second ecosystem mattered a lot.
A search for “506(c)” returned roughly 550 active results, with examples such as real-estate funds, multifamily offerings, real-estate debt, land and other private offerings. So I wasn’t just seeing agencies that claim:
“We’ll find investors for you.”
I was seeing the underlying clients themselves use Meta to reach investors.
That was a stronger chain of evidence.
Conclusion
When testing a new niche to build a business in, the more you spend on ads every day, the quicker you know whether the idea and overall direction are good or just a flop. If I had tried doing this the organic way — with 20 DMs a day and posts on social — it would have taken me a few months.
With advertising, it took me a couple of weeks and a couple hundred bucks.