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I always love talking to other founders about their experiences. Partly because I’m just curious about how people and businesses got to where they are, but also because I always learn a lot I can apply to my own business.
After interviewing Alex Holderness and John Bourne of Holdereness and Bourne fame last week (you can read that Q&A here), I had one big takeaway to apply to Normal Sport as a business.
Here’s the quote.
One thing that I think has been a not obvious source or driver of our success is our willingness to be relentlessly focused within a niche. … Basically, being in a business is just being able to answer questions quickly with high conviction and hopefully a high-quality answer.
That narrows the universe. We're not making tuxedos. What I would say to anybody starting a business is be really focused and very specific, as specific as possible on what it is that you're doing, who your customer is and how your business, your thing, your product is going to appeal to them.
John Bourne
This idea of going deep on a niche is way, way more difficult than it seems like it should be, and I have (somewhat openly) struggled with it since launching Normal Sport full time. Even though I’m the one dispensing that advice as well!
When you are uninhibited by an employer who is at least partially directing your next steps, it opens up the entire creative world. This is the good news. The bad news is the same: It opens up the entire creative world.
The place I have landed on this is that we are a multi-pronged golf media outlet that uses humor and heart to make following golf feel meaningful.
The way I have struggled with this the most is in regards to what kind of content we should produce. I think it’s incredibly important to have audio and video in addition to written content, and our newly launched Normal Sport Show conveys that conviction.
But for a while I thought our niche would simply be a golf newsletter. We would have been the only newsletter-only golf media business. And while I think that could have worked, I think it’s going to be easier to be multidimensional and that we won’t lose too much in the process of transitioning out of just being a newsletter.
That’s the theory anyway.
