The neglected market

john | Feb. 10, 2021, 7:30 p.m.

Business, the one thing that seems to make the world go round, is riddled with opportunity.  Of course when you look at the world through a lens as a seasoned vet, it's easy to see it, but how does one who isn't seasoned actually get to see this opportunity.  Or even harder, how does one, once they see the opportunity, actually take action to cease it.

First we must try and understand what business on a fundamental level really is.  It is the selling of a goods or service in exchange for something of equal value, either another goods or service, or currency represents the equivalent.

Or in none business talk, that just means buy low sell high, or employ people to do work for you at an hour less than you can bill their labor out at.  Now this leaves a few issues of course, in the business sense, time is money since it is what you are paying for.

If you need some one to do something you do not know how to do, or do not want to put in the effort and time to learn to do, you must pay them for their time.  So the one thing businesses are always trying to reduce is the time they must pay people.

There are things that are worth paying people to do, regardless of how expensive you may view it.  Since there are a few things that can only be acquired with experience.  No matter how many books you read on any subject that you are trying to get into or do, you will have a vastly different experience in practice.  The beauty of preparing by reading beforehand is although you may not actually succeed, you will at least have a grasp as to how to attack the problem based on methods that others have tried.

Having also read some of the books you might have insight that other competitors might not, so you may appear to be more skilled.  As you go acquiring experience over the subject you start seeing where some of the material you studied may have been dated, correct, or incorrect.  Either way you start to develop your own method and way of doing things.

This leads to a position in which you finally are able to have enough experience that you start to see what I like to call, neglected markets.  Now what is a neglected market you might ask?

It's a place or thing that has very little or no competitors.  It may appear that there are many competitors, but in reality there are few.   An example of a neglected market would be something that either you search in a search engine, and there are not that many results matching exactly what you are searching for.

This might sound counter intuitive since most things you search for on the internet have thousands, maybe even millions of results.  But this does not mean that those results are exactly what you are looking for.  They might be 90% there.  That's enough for most.  It's that missing 10% that turns into a market.

A good example is languages.  The world is full of immigration.  That means that there are people all over the world that don't speak the most prevalent language in the region.  So take the United States for example.  The majority of the population speaks English, but there is a slow and steady segment of the country that speaks Spanish.  It may be their first language.  If you go to specific parts of the country you find areas where it is easier to get around speaking Spanish than it is English.

This means that those people when searching for business items most likely search in Spanish for things relevant to the U.S.  You see this with advertisements around the country in some establishments that show signs or advertisements that say "Hablamos Español".

So is Spanish then neglected? Sort of, since there are some businesses that decided to also target this minority segment, it's not as neglected.  But a better example of a truly neglected market in the U.S. would be French.

This of course has a cost, to maintain multilingual employees requires higher salaries, as that person is more qualified, but then again this is an online business we are talking about.  So maybe it's not as expensive as it may seem.  So then comes in the analysis of the value gained by attacking the neglected market, but that is for another day.