Super Powers & Niches

How to find your unique value & market niche

Today, I’m going to help you to achieve Course Market Fit by sharing a tried a tested two-step process for finding a high-yield niche for you & your course.

Course Market Fit: A course which learners are buying, benefitting from & telling others about in numbers large enough to drive growth & profitability.

Last week, I wrote a post about how achieving Course Market Fit (CMF) is hard.

• Only ~3% of online courses deliver levels of sustained growth & impact that indicate the achievement of CMF.

• A staggering ~97% of course creators spend hours, days, weeks building courses which sit gathering dust, to a soundtrack of crickets & tumbleweed.

So, what’s the secret of the 3% of course creators who are winning?

1. They identify a niche: find your niche, locate a underserved need within your niche & design a course that meets the need.

2. They build the right thing: create a course that delivers a “beyond YouTube” experience.

Today, I’m going to deep-dive #1 and help you to achieve Course Market Fit by sharing a tried a tested two-step process for finding a high-yield niche.

Let’s go!

Step 1: Find Your Super Power

Everyone has a unique insight - a set of knowledge, skills & experiences that they have gained on their inevitably-unique journey.

Your superpower is the thing that only you have but other people want because it helps them to hit a personal or professional goal. It’s usually related to thing you’re most passionate about, have dedicated most energy to and as a result have unique insights and hacks to share.

Example: there are hundreds course design experts and hundreds of courses about online course design out in the world, but my 20+ year obsession with how to design online courses led me on unique journey of academic research, ed-tech leadership & practical experimentation.

As a result, I have a set of insights, skills & experiences which I can translate into valuable, practical knowledge for others- things like Course Market Fit, Learner Transformation, Minimal Viable Content etc.

Nobody can compete with my offer, simply because it’s unique.

To find your superpower, ask yourself:

• What’s the unique journey I have been on?

• What unique insights have I picked up along the way?

• How could I translate this into practical insights, e.g. frameworks, for others to apply quickly and easily?

Step 2: Define Your [Sub] Niche

One of the big reasons that course creators don’t get traction with their online course & achieve CMF is they aren’t focused on a specific-enough learner.

The trick here is to find a broad audience, pick a niche within it and then if possible, find a sub niche within that group.

Example 1: Athletics 101 > Women Ultra Marathon Runners

• Imagine you’re personal trainer who wants to build an online coaching course.

• Rather than targeting athletes (broad audience), or runners (niche), you could focus specifically on marathon runners (sub-niche).

• If you’re a woman & an ultra marathon athlete, you might go deeper again and focus specifically on women marathon runners (sub-sub niche).

Example 2: Coaching 101 > Coaching Skills for Ed tech Leaders

• Now imagine you're a successful leadership coach.

• Rather than offering a generic course on coaching (low USP in a saturated market), or a sub-niche course on leadership coaching (another saturated market), focus specifically on leadership coaching for Ed tech leaders (an under served sub-sub niche).

• If you’re someone who transitioned into ed tech from another industry, focus specifically on helping people to transition into ed tech leadership roles (an under served sub-sub niche).

The Result? Once you narrow down to a sub-niche:

• your learner is more likely to have the same the same wants & needs as you, which gives you a deep insight into how to serve their pain & deliver delight;

• you can learn more about them - where they hang out online, what they talk and care about most, where they are served and underserved by existing content & courses.

To find your niche, ask yourself:

• Who would benefit in some [ideally materially] way from my unique journey?

• Within that group, is there an underserved sub niche for whom I offer most value?

Happy Designing 👋

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One more thing…. You can apply for a place on the Course Design Accelerator here. It’s a four week, hands-on, cohort-based design sprint where we work together to achieve Course Market Fit by designing or redesign a course of your choice using the science of product + learning.

If you’re a fan of learning science, you may also want to subscribe to the Learning Science Digest, a monthly summary of peer reviewed research on learning science, translated into course design practices - check it out!