MBA2103 Guest Teacher – Frida Leibowitz – How to Identify a Niche in Your Market

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Hey, welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that always got your back every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episodes we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today we have Frida Leibowitz and she'll be teaching you how to identify a niche in your market. One of the biggest mistakes a lot of entrepreneurs, especially first time business owners do, is going too wide. They try to cater to everyone and therefore they cater to no one. You're not resonating with any particular person because you're trying to speak to everyone. And this is why so many people advise to niche down. But how do you identify a niche that's right for you in your market, whatever that market is? How do you carve out something that is unique, that is effective, that is in demand, that will give you a competitive edge? Well that's why we brought on today's expert, Frida Leibowitz. She's going to share her story and how she did exactly that. She's the founder of Debbie over@joindebi.com and she's going to give you real world examples of how to find a niche that works for you. Huge lessons to be learned. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Today's guest teacher, Frida Leibowitz, is the CEO and co founder of Debbie, an innovative platform to help people get out of debt. And she's going to show you how she built her whole business by niching down by finding a niche that works for her and her market so you can do the same. She's going to show you how to do micro and macro research to understand the space that you're working in, how to find critical information to help you with the niching down from your potential users or customers, and how to create a strong feedback group from your early customers so you can use that information to grow even faster. I'm going to pass it on to Frida to teach her lesson, but I'll be back to share my takeaways and to wrap up today's episode. But for now, take it away Frida.

Hi guys, this is Frida Leibowitz. I am the co founder and CEO of Debbie, the first platform that pays you to pay off your debt. Look us up@joint debbie.com super excited to be here today to talk about how you can identify a niche market within a much, much larger market. Let's dive in. Many of us want to solve big problems, but usually when you're going after a big problem, so are a lot of other people. And so that big problem can turn into a very, very crowded market. Think about healthcare, fintech, retail, some of the most important problems to solve in our times. And those are really, really crowded markets. But does that mean that there are no good ideas left to be had? Absolutely not. There are still so many things that we have to solve for in those spaces. Today I want to talk about how you can identify a niche problem within a much, much bigger problem and ultimately Come up with an interesting solution that can win in the long run. So the three key points I want to highlight today are one, doing macro and micro research, really understanding the space you're going after at a high level, but also spending a lot of time researching it on a micro level and an anecdotal basis to being obsessed with listening and identifying acute problems. And three, constantly asking for feedback as you're building out a solution to this problem that you found. Really staying in tune with your target market at every point in time. I want to start by giving you a little bit more of my personal background and explaining how it ties to a problem that I'm really passionate solving. I grew up in a family that was immigrant, single parent, not college educated, and really did not have access to financial literacy. Because of that, we very naturally fell into a horrible cycle of debt. Fast forward a couple years later when I became an adult and started forming my own money habits, I actually fell into the same horrible cycle. Even though I got super lucky. I got a scholarship to go to nyu. I want to study finance, but personal finance was not something folks were talking about outside of the house and I really didn't know any better. Opened up a bunch of credit cards as soon as I turned 18 and racked up $15,000 in credit card debt at about 20 to 30% interest rate. So I was really struggling to make my way out and get started on my life post graduation. At the time, I approached the debt freedom market for the first time as a consumer and I was trying to figure out what solutions exist out here, how do I get myself out of this debt? Horrible mess that I got myself into. And I tried out a bunch of solutions. I tried out balance transfers, a bunch of these debt payoff apps that automate your debt payments. Ultimately, I landed on personal loans. So I use a company called Lending Club, if you ever heard of it, to consolidate all of my credit card debt onto a single monthly payment. And I really, really love that product. And I actually thought this is awesome. This is actually gonna, this can be huge and this can help a lot of people. And because I was so passionate about this problem and I was so excited about Buy the Solution, I actually ended up joining Marcus by Goldman Sachs in their very, very early days to build out their first product which was debt consolidation. At the time, I remember being in this really interesting and unique position where I was both sitting in the borrower's seat and the lender seat at the same time. Now that actually got me to think about this problem. In many interesting ways that maybe were not necessarily obvious to others. And I quickly found myself in a place where I felt that the debt freedom market had not done a good enough job of actually helping folks get out of debt and stay out of debt. And you look at it, it's a huge market, it is super crowded, especially in the last couple of years. But somehow to me, something was missing. And here's where I sort of started going on this process of trying to identify what is this niche thing that's missing in this giant market. So I took a look at it on the macro and micro scales. Started with a macro where I looked at credit card debt, which had actually been increasing, and post Covid actually had its largest increase ever recorded by the Fed. So that was on the, on the one hand, at the same time, I was really paying attention to this other sort of shadow debt that was up and coming, which is why not pay later? So for a lot of folks who have credit card debt on top of that, they were actually also using buy not pay later products, which only made their problems more difficult on the micro level. As I started noticing these trends, I really wanted to tune in to what's happening on the ground and so join a whole bunch of Facebook communities and Instagram communities during COVID actually when the conversation around debt really became a little more open because people felt more comfortable to be vulnerable with each other and so started paying attention to what people were talking about there. And then with my co founders, we actually ended up launching a series of zoom debt support groups where folks from all over the country were able to join and just chat about their debt freedom journey, share tips, and during those sessions, that actually gave us a really good time to listen and understand. Which brings me to my second point. Listening and identifying an acute problem. So during these groups and as we started chatting with more and more folks, we really did not try to solve the problem at first. We tried to first listen and really understand it. And that actually helped us identify what is the missing component in this super crowded market. And that component to us was the human behavioral side of debt. A lot of the debt freedom solutions were trying to solve the practical, the symptom side, but very few of them are actually solving the root causes, psychological reasons why people constantly go in and out of the debt cycle. And we actually tried to identify a similar area in a different industry that we could draw inspiration from. And for us, that was weight loss. So we actually looked at the weight loss space, the sort of behaviors that you see there, and the journey that the weight loss space had done. And we found so many similarities to the consumer debt problem within that space. We ended up identifying NOOM as a really interesting and unique solution. And if you're not familiar with noom, I do really encourage you to look it up and look up their journey. And when you NOOM had done is taken a behavioral approach to a problem that was traditionally solved with very practical measures. Right. So the weight loss space was very focused on symptoms, on telling people how to count calories and how to stop, you know, overeating and all these things, as opposed to trying to understand, like why are they in this situation to begin with, what are the childhood patterns that they might have had, things that like unresolved psychological issues and really go at it from that angle, which is what we wanted to do for the debt payoff space. And then that brought us to the third and last point, which is building the product and constantly looking for feedback. So there are two things we ended up doing there. One, the very first thing we did is build a cap, a customer advisory board. These are folks from the debt freedom community that we identified as awesome partners who really understood the target market and actually gone through the debt freedom journey themselves. And at the same time, they were actually able to join us on the team and really be the first eyes on screens. The first ones were giving us feedback about new features we thought about launching. And this was even pre product, this was before, just in the ideation phase, bringing them in and constantly asking them for feedback about our approach, about the outcomes of how the certain features were rolling out. And then once we did launch the beta, we from the very first day set up this feedback loop where we really encourage our users to set up feedback calls with us. And then we rotate that within the team. So every single person on the team is taking feedback calls, talking to our end users and understanding whether what we had built, the solution that we are rolling out is actually working. And every incremental feature is doing what it, what it's intended to do and at the same time bringing this full circle, paying attention to the problem. And if there's any other issues that arise, like new products that people are seeing in the market or different solutions that they've tried that didn't work for them and why didn't work for them, those are things that we really look for in the feedback loops. To wrap it up, I didn't kind of give you an idea of what we see following these three steps that I mentioned. So on the one hand, seeing awesome results on the demand side. So we now have a wait list of 15,000 people that was 70% organic. So folks coming to us, which is really telling us, hey, we found an interesting angle in a very crowded market, so much so that folks are coming to us themselves and identifying us amongst a million other debt freedom solutions as something that could be interesting for them. And on the beta side, the beta we launched a couple months ago, we're actually starting to see really awesome outcomes for folks where our active users are paying off three times as much debt compared to our non active users. So really, really seeing this sort of come together and have a meaningful impact. And to recap the main point, the macro micro research, really really starting out with that, then moving into being just obsessed with listening, really paying attention to what is your target audience telling you about the problem and in a very acute way, and then finally creating a very, very strong feedback loop where you're constantly monitoring your product and additional developments in the market that you're playing in. This methodology can help you build a niche for yourself in a really crowded space and build a solution that can win in the long run. That's it for me today. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. I hope you enjoyed it and learned something again. This is Frida Leibowitz, co founder and CEO of Debbie. Learn more at join debbie.com Omar, thank you so much for having me back to you today.

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I absolutely love today's guest teacher lesson by Frida Leibovitz because it's a real world example of how to niche. I'm going to give you my own example, but if you want to learn more about what Frida does, go to joindebi.com It's a really interesting platform. You can see how what she taught today, how she put it into action. You can look at the copy on the site. You can see how she really understands the market and understands the niche she's serving. So you could do the same in your own business. For me, when it came to niching down, I can use this podcast actually as an example. Many people don't know, but our first podcast, I had a podcast before this show that really didn't do well at all. It kind of flopped. Big reason why it flopped is because I was just too wide. I wasn't niching down. I wasn't delivering my podcast to a particular group or in a particular way. I was doing interviews. They were very blase and really didn't differentiate me from the rest of the other business podcasts out there. Podcasting is incredibly competitive, so you got a really niche to stand out. Instead, I started the $100 MBA show focusing on my strengths, which is teaching. I was a high school and university teacher for 13 years. This is my forte. This is what I've been doing my adult life. So instead of interviewing, I teach on the podcast for the most part. And that alone was a big differentiator that niched me down. People that like lessons and want quick takeaways to implement in their business rather than long form, maybe storytelling podcasts. In addition, I really just focus on helping small businesses. I don't really help businesses that are trying to go from 10 million to 100 million. I focus on where I can add the most value. I'm really good at helping businesses get to their first million and then from their first million to 10 million. That's really where my strengths are. And this is where I try to help our listeners with the practical lessons and the practical challenges they'll face in those stages of business. So by doing that and niching down and focusing and being a little bit differentiating myself in the way I deliver my product, which is the actual podcast episodes, I resonate strongly with a particular audience. I have people that are really interested in consuming what I have and that's really a huge, huge advantage because people that don't do that, because I used to not do that, it's really frustrating because you're working hard, you're putting out content, you're putting out maybe a product or service and people are just not buying or not biting. And the best thing you can do is to niche. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love it, you hear hit subscribe. It's the best way for you to support the show by hitting follow, subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Also share share the show on social media. Let the world know that you love the $100 NBA show. Share the link100mba.net so they can subscribe as well. Before I go, I want to leave you with this look at any successful brand or product or service out there that maybe you even consumed yourself. They don't serve everybody. They're not for everybody. They've niched down, whether it's McDonald's, you can't order a lobster at McDonald's or the Super 8 motel, which is a budget motel. They don't have room service or the opposite, the Four Seasons, where they are super luxury and they have amazing room service and they're not for people that are budget conscious. So as you can see, if you want to succeed in business, you have to really understand who you're actually serving and choose a niche and serve those people. It makes everything so much easier because then you know exactly who you're talking to. Your messaging is clear. Your decisions on pricing and marketing and branding is so much easier because now you have a clear direction. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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