Don’t Build What You Want — Build What the Market Needs: Lessons from Getting Stuck in a Niche

For a long time, I believed that building something you love was enough. That passion would carry the product, that being the best at something would eventually translate into business. I was wrong. Not completely wrong – passion matters – but I had the equation backwards. I was building what I wanted to build, and hoping the market would agree. That is not a strategy. That is a wish.

This is a post I have been putting off writing for a while, because it means admitting some things that are uncomfortable. But I think it is worth being honest about, because I suspect a lot of builders and founders are in the same trap and do not realise it yet.

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We Got Very Good at One Thing – and That Became the Problem

When we started, we found our footing building products for a specific community platform. We went deep. We understood the ecosystem better than almost anyone. Customers came to us because we knew the product inside out, we shipped reliably, and we cared about the details. Being the go-to people in that space felt like success – and for a while, it was. (If you are at the earlier stage of thinking about building a community platform, there are things worth knowing before you commit.)

But here is what I did not see coming: becoming the expert in a specific niche also means becoming bounded by it. We built product after product for the same platform, the same customer type, the same use case. Every new idea we had was filtered through that lens. “Does this fit our existing customers?” “Can we sell this to the same audience?” We were so focused on deepening our expertise that we stopped looking sideways.

Eventually, you hit a ceiling. The market you are serving only grows so fast. And when you are known as “those people who build for X”, it becomes genuinely hard to be taken seriously outside of X – even when your skills are completely transferable.

Being the best in a small room is not the same as building a business with room to grow.

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The Trap Has a Name: Comfort

Looking back, I can see exactly how we stayed stuck. It was not ignorance – we knew the market was limited. It was comfort. We had customers who trusted us. We had a product catalog that worked. We had processes for the kind of work we already did. Starting something new, in a direction we had not proven ourselves in, felt risky. And risk is uncomfortable when things are going okay.

The existing customer base also created a kind of gravity. Every conversation pulled us back toward their needs, their requests, their existing workflows. That feedback loop is valuable – until it becomes the only feedback loop you listen to. When you only hear from people who are already using your current products, you are not doing market research. You are doing customer service.

There was also fear underneath all of it. Fear that if we tried to expand and failed, we would lose credibility in the one area where we had it. Fear that moving into new territory would dilute what we had built. That fear kept us in a lane that, over time, got narrower.

The signals we ignored

The signs were there if we had been paying attention. Search trends were pointing elsewhere. Adjacent markets were growing faster. Other builders were picking up traction in spaces we had the skills to compete in, but had not bothered to look at. We were heads-down in our niche while the opportunity landscape was shifting around us.

I do not say this to be harsh on ourselves. I say it because it is the pattern I see again and again in small product teams. You find something that works, you go deep, and then deep becomes all you know how to do. The very thing that creates early success sets you up for a plateau.

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What We Should Have Done from the Start

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I think the core mistake was not doing the market research before building. Not once in a while – before every major product decision. Here is what that would have looked like:

Check search volume and trend direction first

Before you build anything, look at whether people are searching for it and whether that search volume is growing or shrinking. This sounds obvious, but most builders skip it because they are in love with the idea. Search trends do not lie. If volume is flat or declining, you are fighting the tide from day one. If it is growing, you have wind at your back.

We built some things where the search demand just was not there at scale. We built them because we thought they were useful, because our existing customers asked for them. But useful to 300 people is not the same as needed by 30,000. That gap matters enormously for a product business.

Map the competitor landscape before writing a line of code

Competition tells you two things: whether there is money in the space, and where the gaps are. No competitors usually means no market. Lots of competitors with weak products means opportunity. Strong competitors with a gap in their offering means you have an angle.

We often looked at a space, saw existing players, and walked away. That was backwards. Competition is proof of demand. The question is not “is someone already doing this?” – it is “can we do this better, or differently, for a specific customer who is not being served well?”

Talk to potential customers before building

Not just your existing customers. People who do not know you yet. People who might buy from you if you built the right thing. The conversations you have with strangers are more honest than the ones you have with loyal customers, because strangers have no reason to be polite about what they need. The best client conversations start with the problem, not the feature list – and that applies whether you are talking to clients or potential product customers.

I have done these conversations. They are uncomfortable, especially when someone tells you that the thing you want to build does not really solve a problem they have. But that discomfort is exactly the point. Better to hear it in a conversation than after six months of development.

Validate with a small version before going all-in

Build the smallest version of the thing that tests the actual hypothesis. Not the full product – the part that answers the question “will someone pay for this?” If you cannot get someone to commit before the full build, that is important information. It does not always mean stop – sometimes it means the framing is wrong, or the audience is wrong – but it should slow you down enough to ask hard questions.

We got better at this over time, but early on we would build fully and then launch and then try to find customers. That is exactly backwards. Find the customers first, then build.

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What We Are Doing Now

The honest answer is we are in the middle of a shift. We have not abandoned what we built – it still runs, customers still use it, and the work still matters to the people it serves. But we stopped treating that niche as the boundary of our ambition.

We are expanding into adjacent spaces. Bringing the same quality and approach we developed in our original niche to markets with bigger ceilings. WooCommerce services. Easy Digital Downloads. Themes that work across different CMS platforms. Full-stack coverage for clients who do not want to piece together five different vendors. The skills we built over years transfer. We are not starting from zero – we are starting with experience, just in a wider arena.

And this time, we are researching before we build. We are looking at search data. We are talking to potential customers outside our current base. We are watching where other businesses are spending money and why. We are trying to understand what the market needs, not just what we want to make.

The skills we built are not niche-specific. Our expertise is in building things that work, shipping reliably, and caring about the customer after the sale. That applies everywhere. We just had to stop pretending it only applied in one place.

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For Other Founders in the Same Boat

If you are reading this and recognising your own situation, here are the things I wish I had told myself earlier.

• Being great in a niche is a starting point, not a destination. The expertise you build in a narrow space is real and valuable. But you have to actively choose to take it somewhere bigger, or the niche will define you permanently.
• Your existing customers cannot tell you where your next market is. They can tell you what they need from you. But the people who are not yet your customers are the ones who hold the map to your next chapter. Talk to them.
• Expanding is not abandoning. Growing into new areas does not mean dropping the people who trusted you early. It means adding, not replacing. The two can coexist.
• Adjacent markets are not as foreign as they look. The jump from one space to a neighbouring one is almost always smaller than it feels. Your customers in the new space have similar problems to the ones you already solved. The framing changes more than the actual work.
• It is never too late to research the market. Even if you have been building for years without doing this properly, you can start now. The next product you build can be the first one you validate properly before committing fully.

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The Hard Part Nobody Talks About

The mental side of this shift is harder than the tactical side. Admitting that you have been building the wrong things – or building the right things in the wrong market – is genuinely painful. It feels like a failure, even when it is not. It is just information. The mistake is not in having built something. The mistake is in refusing to update your strategy when the evidence is telling you something. I wrote about some of these specific mistakes in more detail in what I got wrong building WordPress products – worth reading alongside this.

There is also a kind of grief in it. When you have been “the BuddyPress people” or “the WooCommerce people” or whatever your version of the niche is, part of your identity is tied to that. Choosing to be something more than that means letting go of a version of yourself that you worked hard to build. That is not easy, even when it is clearly the right move.

I sat with that discomfort for longer than I should have. I kept telling myself that growth within the niche was still possible, that we just needed to be more patient. I was not wrong exactly – some growth did happen. But I was using patience as a reason to avoid a harder decision. There is a difference between being patient with a strategy that is working slowly, and being patient with a strategy that has hit its ceiling.

The thing that finally moved me was a simple question someone asked in a conversation: “If you were starting fresh today, with all the skills you have now, would you build the same things in the same market?” My honest answer was no. And that gap between what I would choose today and what I was still doing was the signal I had been avoiding.

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Passion Still Matters – But It Is Not the Full Answer

I want to be clear about something. I am not saying passion does not matter. It does. If you do not care about what you are building, that shows up in the quality of the work and in your ability to push through difficult periods. Passion is the fuel.

But passion is not validation. The fact that you want to build something is not evidence that anyone wants to use it. The most sustainable businesses are the ones where your passion for the work aligns with actual market demand. That is the combination you are looking for. Not one or the other – both.

The research does not replace the passion. It helps you direct the passion somewhere that can actually pay off. And when you find that intersection – where what you want to build is also what the market genuinely needs – the work feels different. Lighter, somehow. Because you are not constantly fighting to be discovered. You are just building something people were already looking for.

We are still finding that intersection in some of the new areas we are expanding into. We do not have everything figured out. But the difference is we are asking the market first now, not after the fact. That change alone has shifted how we think about every new product conversation.

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A Quick Framework Before Your Next Build

If you are at the point of deciding whether to build something new, here is a simple set of checks I try to run through now before committing:

Question	What a good answer looks like
Is there search demand for this, and is it growing?	Volume exists and trend is flat or rising
Who is already serving this need, and how well?	Competitors exist (market proven), but with gaps you can fill
Have I talked to 5-10 people who would be the buyer?	At least 3 said they would pay for this
Can I test this with a small version before full build?	Yes, and I have a plan for what “test passed” looks like
Am I building this because I want it or because someone needs it?	Honest answer is: someone needs it, and I happen to want to build it

None of these questions take more than a week to answer. But skipping them can cost you months of misdirected effort. I speak from personal experience on that one.

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Still Learning

I am writing this from inside the process, not from the other side of it. We have not fully arrived at the expanded version of what we are building – we are in transition. Some of what we try will work. Some will not. But the difference now is we are choosing where to try based on evidence, not just instinct.

That feels like progress. Slow, sometimes frustrating, but real progress. And I think that is all any of us can do – keep updating our thinking based on what the evidence is showing us, even when the evidence is uncomfortable.

If you have been through something similar – got stuck in a niche, had to rethink your direction, figured out a way to expand without losing what you built – I would genuinely like to hear about it. The details are always different but the core experience is usually recognisable. There is something useful in knowing you are not the only one who got this wrong and then figured out a path forward.