December 29th, 2019
This is a follow up to this post and this post, which both address some of my plans and ideas for taking Pigeon to the next level in 2020.

The idea is to actually go and find a "market" for Pigeon.

Pigeon is a great universal tool because it lives in Gmail, but as a bootstrapper, it makes a lot more sense to start with a more targeted niche. One day it will be great to have Pigeon serving hundreds of different use cases (and I genuinely think it can be that) but I need to get real with myself a bit here. I'm not a VC backed startup, but I'm acting and like one in terms of the "go to market" strategy.

In my post from a few weeks ago, I talked about how I scoured the reviews for Streak in the Chrome web store and logged all the different use cases that came up (and how many times).

I finished up with that and built a scoring index in Google sheets based on a few questions like "how big is the market?", "how easy to get in front of them?", etc.

Here are the 3 use cases that we will start with in 2019.

  1. Freelancers (facebook ads consultant, freelance designer, content writer)
  2. Contractors (general, landscape, lighting)
  3. Realtors

Freelancers and contractors scored highest based on my scoring system, and realtors didn't score that well, but they appeared the most in the reviews.

I will test these markets for the next 3 months. January, Feb, and March. After 3 months, based on my results, I will decide to keep targeting these markets, potentially drill down further into a more specific niche (i.e. commercial realtors) or go for a new niche altogether.

Excited for 2020. Wish me luck.