How to find your niche in a vegan market

The beauty of the Internet is there’s a niche market for everything, and if you can focus on it, you can build a sustainable and viable business of it.

Michelle Phan

A mistake so many companies make when starting out is that they want to please everyone. Moreover, are afraid to say no to so many different requests that they become a jack of all trades.

This happened to me at the beginning of my career in the construction industry. I would take all the jobs offered because I felt that I needed the work.

It was the wrong decision because I ended up a general practitioner, it wasn’t until I found my niche in eco heating that I could give more value as I was giving 100% to that one area.

Meaning I could continuously hone that skill and increase the speed/ productivity, and this ensured a far better quality end product/ service meaning my value/ reputation as an expert went up.

If your struggling with finding that niche it’s essential to ask yourself these questions:

What are you most passionate about? 

When setting up Empa7hy magazine, I knew that my purpose in life was to help end the suffering of the needlessly abused and tortured animals.

For me to work seven days a week on a project it had to be something that had a real purpose behind it, not just a business that was only going to fulfil my needs of food and shelter and trinkets.

My need to help animals comes from my need to help people. I can see the good in everyone. Even a Broken Clock is right twice a day they as they say!

However, being passionate isn’t all it takes to create a successful business but it a good start, the next question we have to ask is:

What are you good at?

This question is key to finding the right path to go down.
If I had just stuck to the vegan passion idea, I would be starting a vegan restaurant for a living, and if you’ve ever seen my cooking you would know that this wouldn’t be a wise idea, even if I got a chef in doing the cook work my thoughts and understanding around food are extremely basic.

For me my skills and experience lay in running small start-ups in the construction industry, how could I put this to good use in the vegan world, well one way would be to start implementing more vegan-based products and bring in more sustainable building practises like using recycled materials.

However, for me, this didn’t fulfil my need to be active full time in the plant-powered world.
My next thought, what business could I start that I would be able to make the most significant impact?

I loved helping friends and family with their business problems and had spent a tremendous amount of time and money on self-development could this help the animals? The next question was to ask

What does the market want and need?

As Plant powered entrepreneurs we know that the world needs a new more sustainable business model, but not everyone does.

Your product needs to be desired by the market you want to target.

Now is when you start looking around at your competition and see who else is doing it if nobody is doing it why not?

Is that a great opportunity or does it mean that nobody will buy it?

With most plant-based business’s there’s a lot of space currently in this market.

We need to look over at the traditional markets and see what they are doing and create a vegan version. For instance, the vegan travel industry is booming, a couple of years ago it wasn’t even a thing!

Before starting Empa7hy magazine, I looked at the self-transformation market and start-up business market and realised that there are very few companies in this space who have any heart.

Although, there are quite a few self-improvement companies in the mainstream market, and although the mainstream market caters to everyone as does the vegan market (that’s the ultimate goal), I know from personal experience that the challenges faced by vegan businesses are somewhat unique.

The most obvious being that there is such a massive pressure to succeed, not from a shareholders point of view but a life or death point of view.

This leads us to the final Question:

Will people pay for it?

This seems obvious but if people won’t buy then you go out of business, which is a huge disservice to the cause you are wanting to support.

A business needs to offer a return for the customer hard-earned money, If you are going to sell vegan cakes the cake needs to be more than vegan it needs to taste better than the competition’s cake so that the customer keeps coming back and eventually become fans of your vegan product/service.

To test this try selling a product before you make it, this way you will see if people are just being nice or they actually want it.

OK so you have yourself a Niche, now can you find a niche in that niche. For example, if you were selling vegan cakes could you make it vegan, gluten-free, choc-chip muffins this is going to give you an advantage in as far as there will be people looking for that niche who want a specialist rather than a jack of all trade.

Once you have established this niche you can expand so don’t feel stuck for life, but ensure you you have a core signature offering.

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