Every MVP is diverse, even if it’s in a single domain. Ecommerce is not a niche; there are a hundred niches inside ecommerce, for example. So, even if you’ve built a dozen MVPs in ecomm, you still can’t claim specialization.
Enterprise clients either require hyper-specialization or prior enterprise experience. There is no other way to secure long-term contracts.
MVPs are a self-perpetuating cycle that eventually dwindles to zero.
This is one of the few channels on YouTube that gets raw about the dev shop experience. Thoughts?
I genuinely believe working (i.e., a job) in any industry for a few years before launching your agency in that space is the best way to go. If you are straight out of college and want to do your own agency, my best advise is to … don’t. There is no overnight success or easy way to money. It’s always a better idea to acquire real expertise before you try to sell your expertise. Of course you can build a body shop and trade in prime years of your youth for dubious returns and 5-10 years later, realize you didn’t build real expertise in anything and the agency you built is fundamentally capped in its ability to scale.
All forms of building expertise (networking, reading books and publications, etc.) are incomplete without doing the work yourself.
Now, what if you’ve already launched an agency?
That’s a lengthy topic. Basically how to pivot into a niche. In broad strokes:
Deeply research one niche and decide on what problem you want to solve for that.
Spin up a new Linkedin page or domain or landing page (depending on which channel you use for outreach) and dedicate it to that niche + problem combo.
Do outreach. Gauge interest. The ideal niche + problem combo will net you a 20%+ positive response rate even without a case study or past experience.
Try to close a few prospects. Work for free or do discounts if you have to (depends on the strength of niche + problem combo however).
You only have to close one client and successfully deliver. The rest is step 3 on repeat with more and more compounding proof overtime.
Not sure about finding niche, but building MVPs actually helped us move fast and fail fast. By focusing only on MVPs, we were able to pivot three times in just a couple of months. For each idea, we created a pitch deck and a bare-bones yet fully working platform.
