Monetizing 'Convenience'
How to grow on the shoulders of Titans?
Welcome to this week's edition of Above The Fold! And to all the new subscribers since last week - thank you, and good call!
I admit that the title and the tagline may have been a little confusing, but bear with me for a minute.
We’ve been seeing a trend for the past year or so, where people are making bank, by building Shopify apps, Chrome extensions (a lot), Google Docs apps, and other helpful software that enable users of big platforms (i.e., Google, FB, IG, LI, Pin, etc.) to ease up their workloads by assisting and automating certain tasks.
Popular examples are, but not limited to, data scrapers, writing assistants, multi-purpose software, automation tools, etc.
These developers didn't invent anything new. Instead, they just build something for a platform that already had millions of users.
This saved a lot of time, energy, and resources that they have to spend marketing the product from scratch, doing market research, getting new users, etc.
Instead, all they had to do was post about the tool to a few communities of the platform users and wait and see the customers rolling in. Sometimes, the platforms themselves promoted these products, in order to attract users for the sake of convenience.
Compared to building complex software, these were much simpler to build. Many even used tools like ChatGPT or Bard to create Chrome extensions.
One of many ways one can apply this strategy to their ventures is to seek out the industry giants of your niche, and collaborate with them, that'll serve their own customers or clients. Since this is a win for them, they'll immediately get on board. Even if they don't, you can still target their customers, by finding them on popular social platforms.
If you're hungry for success, but don’t have any idea as to what you should do, maybe you too can feed a little bit off of an industry giant. After all, leverage is a one of mankind's greatest tools.
Till next week,
-Jay.
If you have any questions, just reply to this email, or reach out via abov@post.com