When I first started to build directories, I would see a competitive niche and think to myself "wow that market is way too saturated", and make a mental note never to build in the niche.
But I'd quickly remind myself of a lesson that I learned from my first business.
I was 23 years-old, pulled together some money from family members and entered an industry where giants like Nike, Adidas and Puma dominated the category.
If it's not obvious, I started a footwear company as my first business.
The reason I was still able to grow the business to $25k/month, with my highest month being $48k (revenue, not profit), wasn't because my products or marketing were better than Nike, Adidas and Puma.
It was because I catered to a very specific sub-niche.
This is going to sound really LA, but the concept was a vegan leather shoe company.
For context, I was raised vegetarian and immersed in a world of vegetarian/vegan friendly products my entire life (as a joke I tell people I was raised by Asian hippies). From an early age I got to observe how a person's beliefs and values drove them to reject 90% of what the world conveniently had to offer as far as food options and clothing.
Anyways, I ran that business for 5 years and it taught me that saturated markets create tiny pockets of opportunity - small ecosystems within a larger ecosystem where entire businesses can be built.
I look at it the same way that people choose ice cream flavors. Some people only like vanilla ice cream. Others like mint-chip or strawberry. Then there's people who just prefer sorbet.
I sold shoes to the sorbet-lovers of the world.
A Saturated Directory Niche has Multiple Winners
I've spent years looking at search data for hundreds of different niches and industries.
The same pattern with fragmented demand exists in a lot of saturated markets.
Take the senior living niche for example. This year it's estimated to be a $120 billion market on it's way to $154 billion by 2033 (these are just US numbers btw).
There are dozens of seven to nine-figure directories like Care.com, seniorliving.org, and aplaceformom.com to name a few.
While the giants are competing for keywords like "senior living near me", I'd look for those tiny pockets of opportunity.
You can call them long-tail keywords from an SEO perspective, but these are things people search into Google that represent a very real preference when it comes to looking for a senior home.
Here are a few examples I found:
- Senior living with beauty services
- Senior living with personal chefs
- Senior living with garage
- Senior living with social events
- Senior living with cooking classes
- Senior living with indoor pool
- Senior living with dogs
The list goes on.
The thing is, it's hard to say how important these amenities are to a person looking for senior living. It could be a nice add-on, or it could be a major dealbreaker.
All I know is that if I were to build a directory in this space, these are the types of people I'd be looking to serve.
Sure the search volume and market will be much smaller, but in high-ticket niches it's more important for me to get the right type of high-buyer intent traffic than high monthly traffic as a general strategy.
This is all to say that when I see a saturated market today, instead of immediately turning around and walking away I see it as a invitation to find the pockets of opportunity that exist.
The worst case scenario is that I build out a directory, only to realize that the SEO competition is harder to conquer than I thought.
In this case, I'd take my lessons and turn them into foresight for when I decide to build in another saturated niche in the future.
