The Embedded Entrepreneur: How to Build an Audience-Driven Business

You now will be left with several audiences that have passed the following checkpoints: You’re aware of the niche. You’re interested in the niche. You’ve found interesting problems in the niche. You’ve seen signs from the niche of interest to pay for solutions. You’ve found that the niche is big enough for your business.

Water coolers. These are the informal communities of your niche. This is where they gather without being asked to, where they exchange information freely and without supervision. Facebook groups, e.g., “Plumbing Hacks And Plumbing Professional Discussions.” You might need to work a bit to get into these groups, but explaining that you’re interested

Find a community forum or social media group where your niche audience hangs out and go through their recent posts. Are people struggling with things that you would find interesting to help them with? Do you think the audience members need help that has not been given to them in the past?

Do you believe that the members of this audience deserve to succeed much more than they currently do? Do you imagine conversations with these people to be interesting, fruitful, and enjoyable? Do you see a more profound reason, a passion that drives this audience's members to do what they do? Is the audience doing something meaningful? Could the pe

Add a new column to your spreadsheet, called "Affinity." For every row in your spreadsheet, you will need to produce a rating between 0 and 5. Zero means that you don't care about serving this audience at all, and 5 means that you want to devote your life to serving the people in that niche.

No business was ever successfully built by a founder who didn't care about the people they were selling their product to. You need to feel the desire to help your customers genuinely, or you will lose interest in providing value to them at some point.

What hobbies do you have? What do you enjoy enough to spend money on, even though it’s not essential? Examples here are things like craft beer or fixing old cars. Find activities you have a budget for.

With a list of possible audiences and niches, you now need to weed out the markets you don't care about enough.

What tribes do you belong to? What communities are you part of, consciously (because you participate, like being a chess club member) and unconsciously (by affiliation, like being a sports fan)? It can involve virtual communities and real-world groups alike.