Productivity - The Surprising Unsaturated Niches
Whenever I hear of an entrepreneur who has started a channel or blog that resulted in products of info products in the "productivity" niche, I'm surprised.
One of the reasons is that some entrepreneurs who have tried it failed. I remember taking a course, and the course creator said flat out that the productivity niche didn't work because he failed at it.
But I have come to realize that some niches actually can be never-ending wells, and productivity is one of those that surprises me.
On the one hand, it seems to make sense that it failed for that one entrepreneur because his audience were more along the lines of "faith healers" or spiritual-relationship people. I don't know the exact term, I think he may have used it; but I suspect that they didn't value it as an overall group of people.
Productivity sells the narrative of buying back more time: of achieving more more quickly.
And the reality is that the world has gotten more complicated. And so it would make sense to want a way to simplify matters.
Time -- and the "management of time" -- does seem to have a resonance with professionals and entrepreneurs because those professions do experience a very busy life.
The time management diaries that used to sell -- to the point where it probably became a core revenue line for Stephen Covey's business -- points to how people have wanted better time management even before the rise of social media and mobile devices.
What makes some of these entrants so profitable -- I just listened to a podcast where someone makes $2.5M per year -- is the shift from pure information to digital tools. Templates, for things like Notion, continue to gain traction because of the underlying growth of Notion.
How and why that grew is also a story. I remember exploring how to do this, as did many other people, in terms of better note taking and organizing tools. The success was combining flexibility (putting things where one wants to) with organizing primitives (tables, databases, links, etc).
Once this "standard" proliferated, teaching people how to tame complexity in order to gain back time seems like the equation. More complicated things, especially once they are part of one's productivity workflow, often need that complexity to solved; it can't be solved by the platform because they need all that functionality and generalizability for the larger TAM.
Excel is similar to this. Excel is a beast; and a huge market emerged for teaching people how to use Excel.
This becomes a bit of a flywheel: more people are selling services on top of this platform; which improves the platform usability, expands use cases; it may also even generate demand by introducing more people to the tool.
So this is a valuable lesson for the platforms, as well, of creating super users on top of it.