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How to approach a small market?

Dsant

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Hello!

I'm going to tell my story, and then I will tell you the problem I'm facing if you're not interested in reading the story just skip to "STARTS HERE", thank you!

So where to start.. A couple of years ago, I was stuck at a 9-5 job I hated and I was really lost in what to do with my life and so I decided to search, "how to make money online" in the internet, and I've found a book by Robert Kiyosaki called "Rich dad poor dad", as I'm sure most of you know this book, I fell in love with it and went to search for more related books.
That's when I've found TMF , and I was mindblown. Never in my life, I thought I could make my own business and have success in life, and have the thing I value the most "being free".

After finding this gold gem I decided I wanted to change my life, I searched about meditation I made multiple schedules, I joined a gym and started eating healthy, but the only thing I've maintained until now from this is the gym and eating healthy.. it kinda became a habit and I just don't stop, I failed miserably at the schedule part and meditation.

I then found this Forum and started looking around, and decided to join, later on, this was in 2015 so 4 years ago.

And until this day I haven't done anything relevant, not because I don't want to but because I get stuck on choosing a product idea...
I've seen countless courses on Dropshipping and print on demand, I was in multiple facebook groups around these subjects, seen multiple videos on youtube, seen multiple forums, and the best I made was a website in Shopify used Oberlo to source products and put them on my website, long story short i had around 5 stores with 5 different niches, nome of them went live (I made one at the time not multiple at the time).

All of this happened 3 years ago.

Then I gave up on the idea because I knew it was not the ideal business type because I lacked control over it, and shipping times were really big and it could be easily copied by some other person.

Then I tried eBay, yea still lacking control I knew it wasn't the best choice as well but I just wanted to make something, anything just to make me start, I started watching flipping videos on youtube, and heck I decided to try it myself.
I sold Macdonald's toys, a happy meal here in Portugal costs around 3.30€, and I saw toys being sold around 9.95$ to 15$ on eBay, but I didn't really buy the happy meals I just bought the toys "around 200" on bulk from a guy on a website called OLX ( used goods website ), I bought them for 25€, and I sold about 100 ( still have the other 100 at the house but I stopped selling them ), so I made my money back and some more of it, but I just couldn't scale it and the profit margins weren't that big because I had free shipping worldwide, and some toys I had to lower prices because they weren't selling for months.

All of this I was doing while having my 9-5 job, and since I had an income I got comfortable on my job even though I hated it...
But time is passing by and I'm realizing, if I don't do this now, I will regret it big time.
So I quit my job, and went to live with my girlfriend ( 5 years relationship ) which was living in another town, things went wrong passed 3 months, and we broke up. I had to quit the job and had to head back to my parents' house, and here I am, I had some money saved from the jobs I had, because I saved at least 60% of my income every month, and so I decided I would not find a job, for now, to focus 100% on creating a business.

STARTS HERE

So now I'm trying to focus on Portugal market, I want to create my own brand, website and make ADS to makes sales, but I'm stuck in the niche selection...
Portugal is not that big of a country ( around 10 million people in total ), and I'm thinking of using FB ads + Instagram.

in Audience insights I see there are around 7-8 million active people in facebook.

The most common thing I find in facebook is apparel for woman, searching only Portuguese pages, and I see that most of the products are from Aliexpress, and they don't even have a website, they just sell directly on Facebook, I see a space for improving here, but I'm not sure I wanna compete here because the market seems so saturated..

I even searched Socks, since it's kind of broad and I don't really see many of these apparel stores selling, there are some socks on Alibaba and even Aliexpress that you don't really find here in Portugal, but I just don't see space to profit in this niche.. ( yes i know the sites I mentioned are not the best places to source products, specially Aliexpress for the pricing).

Let's say I go after a big niche like "dogs" it has around 1.5-2.0 million people, it's too broad and hard to target, so I search for "labrador retriever" and it drops to 90-100k people only.. it seems so small, that I'm not sure if it's a viable market to invest in.. and I don't even know what products to sell to a community like this, I can only think of apparel like "print on demand" stuff..

I want to go niche because I have a bigger chance of converting sales, but since Portugal is such a small market I'm not sure if I'm not gonna be able to scale later on...

I'm pretty sure I'm overthinking, every niche I think in trying and do the research seems to have some sort of problem, I think I'm trying to find the perfect niche and that ain't gonna happen, but I just wanted to make sure that at least I'm not failing in such basic stuff, like being sure I can scale the business and have customers to maintain it...

Thank you for reading, and if you have any suggestions I would really appreciate them!
 
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rwhyan

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I want to go niche because I have a bigger chance of converting sales, but since Portugal is such a small market I'm not sure if I'm not gonna be able to scale later on...

You are worrying about step 2 when you haven't done step 1 yet.

Cross the next bridge when you get to it.

Start with a small niche, don't even worry about scaling it yet.

And chances are, as long as you aren't selling low ticket items to a small niche, you can probably generate a lot more revenue than you may think.
 

NMdad

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You are worrying about step 2 when you haven't done step 1 yet.

Cross the next bridge when you get to it.

Start with a small niche, don't even worry about scaling it yet.

And chances are, as long as you aren't selling low ticket items to a small niche, you can probably generate a lot more revenue than you may think.
Agree. Start with a small niche in which you can create a beachhead, and which would allow you to expand into a medium/larger niche.
 

Dsant

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Jun 7, 2015
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You are worrying about step 2 when you haven't done step 1 yet.

Cross the next bridge when you get to it.

Start with a small niche, don't even worry about scaling it yet.

And chances are, as long as you aren't selling low ticket items to a small niche, you can probably generate a lot more revenue than you may think.

You got a point, I was trying to make sure everything was ok before I started, so I don't build a house on a weak foundation, and it falls later on.

But I can always start small and then expand as @NMdad said.
 
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GravyBoat

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These questions are too broad. Pick something and run with it. You can always expand overseas?

in Audience insights I see there are around 7-8 million active people in facebook.

Also this is F*ckin crazy. That means 70-80% of the ENTIRE POPULATION of Portugal are on Facebook!!
 

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