Provisional Order on Endless Niche Research
The niche was identified in September. The competition analysis has been open in a browser tab since October.
MEETING MINUTES Subject: Endless Niche Research Attendees: One founder. No customers. No co-founder. No agenda distributed in advance.
Item 1: Status Update on Niche Selection
The niche was selected in September. The niche is a subcategory of productivity tools aimed at a specific professional type whose problems the subject believes are underserved by existing solutions. The subject has researched this niche for eleven weeks.
Current status of research: ongoing.
Reason research is ongoing: three competing products were discovered in week four that were not present in the initial search. The competing products must be assessed before the niche can be confirmed as viable.
The assessment has been underway for six weeks.
Item 2: Competition Analysis Review
Seventeen competing or adjacent products have been documented in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has nine columns: product name, pricing, target user, key features, notable weaknesses, last update date, user review score, estimated revenue range, and a notes field.
The notes field contains observations like "similar audience but different use case" and "probably not a direct competitor but relevant" and "need to revisit this one."
Six products are marked "need to revisit this one."
Item 3: The Governing Rule
Visible preparation counts as revenue adjacent activity until the first customer forces a different standard. No customers have applied the standard. The research therefore remains classifiable as progress.
The project is supposed to create freedom, yet it keeps generating unpaid administrative work. This month's unpaid administrative work: seventeen competitor profiles, four niche feasibility essays written in a private document, two conversations with people in the potential user category where the subject described the idea without mentioning it was an idea, and one revised one-sentence description of the product that is now on its sixth iteration.
Item 4: Resolution
The subject resolved to complete the competition analysis by the end of the month. The end of the month is Wednesday.
Five products remain in the "need to revisit" category. Three of those five led, during initial review, to three additional adjacent products that were not in the original research set.
Eventually endless niche research acquires an unwritten enforcement system that everyone denies creating. The research has become the product's current phase. It has been the current phase for eleven weeks. Nobody set a deadline on leaving it.
Action Items
Complete competition analysis. Begin product.
Next Meeting
When the competition analysis is complete or December arrives, whichever comes first.