6 builders who never spoke to each other

Pick the market nobody is excited about

Money pouring into a sector buys you well-funded rivals, so the quieter category, the one others avoid on reputational grounds, or the single city or country nobody is serving properly, leaves the demand intact with far less competition. Heat is a cost, not a signal.

The method

1. 01

   Consider entering a market nobody is excited about. Heat in a market means competitors, and competitors lower your odds.

2. 02

   Deliberately pick the unfashionable market. Sectors with money pouring in are competitive and overfunded, so a smaller one nobody is watching is easier to take.

3. 03

   Serve the category everyone else avoids for reputational reasons and you inherit the demand with far less competition.

4. 04

   Deliberately serve one country only: you reach fewer people but you compete against far fewer publishers for them.

5. 05

   Humour is a commercially serious content niche, not a hobby format: a satire site can out-earn most review sites in the same market.

What it returned

• 30

  Glen Allsopp estimates 30 to 40% of Patreon content is adult, yet the platform has no adult category and even direct searches fail to surface it, so nobody finds it by chance. His prediction is that whoever builds the dedicated version, with deliberately general branding, does very well.

• 88%

  Livewire runs the SeekingAlpha model for Australia alone, and roughly 88% of its estimated 500,000 monthly visits come from Australia.

• $4.3M

  DailyMash, a British satire site, turned over $4.3M during 2021 and cleared more than $1M of profit, close to the GBP 1.2M it sold for in 2019. Profits rose 640% across three years. Owner Digitalbox trades on the London Stock Exchange.

• The founder explored food and workspace ideas, judged both too crowded and too well funded, and moved to car maintenance instead.

Sources

• Livewire Revenue, Traffic & SEO Playbook (2023) - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · An Interesting Concept Resulted In Australia’s Fastest Growing Investment Insights Website · 2023-06-24
• 54 of the Biggest Earners on Patreon (And What They're Selling) - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · Doughboys: $11,402+ per month · 2023-01-04
• 20 Successful Blogs And Their Latest 2024 Revenue Numbers - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · DailyMash : $4.3M in Revenue and $1M Profit · 2022-01-23
• From Desk Job to Building a $60k/mo Cleaning BusinessFinn Pegler · failory.com · How did you go from idea to product? · undated
• Friday - From side project to raising $450kLuke Thomas · failory.com · If you had the chance to do things differently, what would you do? · undated
• Howell Market: How Bad Partners Killed an e-CommerceCody Howell · failory.com · If you had to start over, what would you do differently? · undated
• Building and Growing the Airbnb for Car MaintenanceAndy Bowie · failory.com · What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea? · undated
• How the most successful B2B startups came up with their original ideaRujul Zaparde · lennysnewsletter.com · Path 2: Ponder and probe · 2023-08-08