Hunting the Propitious Niche (Maybe don’t get your hopes up…)

It seems a quite a few folk are searching the net hunting for a business opportunity – or at least how to find one (No… there are very few in Detroit right now..). Strangely (and I refer here with respectful wonderment) I seem to get a fair rate of searches for propitious niche ending up at this blog, so I have decided to take advantage of this propititious circumstance and say a few words on the subject.

First, lets go back to basics here. The word propitious simply means ‘favourable conditions’ (note, titling my blog the ‘favourable conditions manager’, just doesn’t quite have the same ring about it..). The word niche in a business context means appealing or appropriate market or segment. So a propitious niche refers to an appealing market segment favourable presumably to a product or service or business idea.

Now I have done a bit of googlie research to see what people have to say about propitious niches. For example, one of the top listed results seems to be from the American University of Bulgaria World Business 101 course which suggests:

A propitious niche – a niche is propitious to the extent that it is just large enough for one firm to satisfy the demand.

The search came up with a number of SWOT analyses, and papers about propitious niches in the business planning context. The basic theme is how one should search for one, and then the difficulties of hanging on to it if you do find one. One somwhat bold idea was that the firm that discovered baking soda actually discovered a proptious niche. This of course raises the interesting issue because I would imagine that the market for baking soda, has become somewhat competitive and that the niche characteristics were rather short lived.

Another idea was that propitious niches are relatively common in the IT market – although I imagine again that any good idea either collapses into a competitive market or is bought by a very large company who has the market power to try and defend its property rights – temporarily at least.

Perhaps the most interesting link from my search was a question on WikiAnswers requesting 4 examples of a propitious niche. To date there is no answer.

Now my recollection is that a great idea pretty quickly becomes a competitive market (even the ipod has many competitors) or a finite product life (how many old game consols have you got hanging around from the past 15 years). There are also very few instances where you can grow a company with a market and keep out competitors without a bit of help from government regulators, and good luck to you if you come across a natural monopoly.

Perhaps my local grass mowing service has a propitious niche. I can’t imagine that the old folks of the neighborhood will give up their trust in him, so he’s got this niche market pretty much sown up. Mind you the growth prospects are slow and the economies of scale few. Whatsmore, if the drought comes and everyone switches to synthetic lawn he might have problems.

So good luck with the hunt for a propitious niche. If you find one maybe drop me a line (or maybe not if you want to keep the niche) – which pretty much explains why there aren’t any examples of propitious niches on Wikianswers.