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ForumsThere are plenty of business books out there that will tell you that your business should service some sort of niche market. What is a niche market? Wikipedia describes it as:
“A niche market is a focused targetable portion (subset) of a market.
By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. A niche market may be thought of as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.”
Many business books also say that you should thoroughly research the niche before you start a niche business to make sure that it is profitable and enough clients will exist. In the computer service field there is a huge amount of niches such as:
- Repairing networks for huge corporations with 500+ computers
- Repairing computers/networks for the military or in hostile areas
- Servicing commercial computers and systems like Point-of-Sale systems and barcode scanners
There are countless possibilities in the service field. In the hardware field there are options such as high end gaming machines, point-of-sale computers and many other computers to fill a niche.
In this article I am going to write about what I believe to be a bad computer hardware niche and what I believe to be a good hardware niche.
An example of a bad niche is Gaming Machines
When choosing a niche you need to look at the type of people who will be buying your goods and services.
What types of people typically buy high end gaming machines? Generally teenagers and young adults. The reason why I believe this would be a bad niche is because I know that when I was in my teens I didn’t exactly have cash flowing out of my pockets.
High end gaming machines can also be a warranty burden since they are more likely to have problems with overheating and overclocking.
I understand that some businesses have been very successful with gaming machines such as Alienware, but they have custom made case designs and market them to the extreme. Actually, it appears they filled a niche within a niche, gaming machines which look great.
An example of a good niche: CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) Machines
A niche that I would prefer to service is building CAD machines. To build a CAD machine, it requires a little bit of knowledge about the difference between a CAD machine and a regular machine. You can’t just slap a high end gaming card into one and hope it works well. My father’s 256mb CAD video card will outperform my 640mb 8800GTS gaming video card when rendering in AutoCAD and Solidworks. It will look much better too.
What types of clients buy CAD machines? Businesses.
Businesses understand that it takes money to make money and to many established businesses the cost of a computer isn’t that much when they could be earning $14,000 per job with it. Chances are you will have a check in your hand before you finish your sales pitch.
This niche could be particularly good for me since my father works in the CAD industry so I already have potential contacts. I wouldn’t focus on building only CAD machines since I still want to service my usual home and business clients, but I would want to make myself the go to guy when my father’s colleagues need a CAD machine.
If a self employed computer technician had worked in another industry before they started their computer business, they may already have an intimate knowledge of a certain industry. For examples sake, let’s say they used to work at a printing press. They may already know a lot of how the printing setups work which could make them ideal to service print shops computers since they have dealt with them before. It could be a nice niche to specialise in.
Find a niche that you think needs servicing, try to determine how much work you believe would be available. Find out what type of clients will buy from you and what sort of money they are willing to spend. If you find that there should be a lot of work and the clients are willing to spend more for specialized work, you might have found yourself a nice niche.
Thanks for the info
Just one little question:
Have any idea how to approach these niche markets in case of finding one?
In regards to build niche I would say the HTPC niche is a growing market. They can be built for under a grand and still play the new HD formats. The most difficult part is the case as it does need to be astheticly pleasing design.
I heard about render farms that being build with multiple gaming video cards could this also work for solidworks or inventor?
Here is the site about this:
http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/index.html#
This is a great article. Finding a niche in your market is very desirable. It can be rather daunting, but well worth the effort if you hit pay dirt and find that perfect untapped profitable niche. Thanks for the info.
Our Niche for the store I work at would be for cheap machines that just work.
We have a ton of refurbished machines that we crank the ram up on to 384-512 and sell for around 175$. 766Mhz - 1.0 , 384-512 RAM, 20 gig hard drives and XP.
They aren’t the greatest- but if you have to have a machine, they are wonderful. We have customers that have had them for 6 years.
We generally use these systems as intro machines- say a customer only has 200 bucks for a few months, but one of these, use it for 45 days, then bring it back and move into a better system, so now new systems cost them 325 instead of 500. Other stores have tried to copy our low budget machines, but they just can’t keep the quality in there.
The niche we’re hitting hard is teaching/configuring businesses and business users in how to access their corporate data and/or work from home. This is going to be a Big Deal - it used to be just salespeople and management that we’d set this up for, now it’s becoming prevalent for even clerk-level people to work at home a couple of days a week.
Good article. I like both examples…Showing well type of client which is and isn’t potential for money making.
A good niche to target is one that is in the news a lot (eg credit crunch). However sometimes that means your traffic dies away over time.
Lets not forget there other niches to consider as well, such as services and consultancy - e.g. DR plans for business, backup strategies, security advice etc.