Chapter 1 - What is a Niche Market? - Are You In It To Win It

on their car. The first Seattle teenager to call their style "grunge". The firstadult who posted pictures of their life-sized Lego models on the Internet.Every fad and "meme" started as an idea in just one person, who spread itaround. In some cases, that person founds a lifestyle.Stumble upon oneNiches are waiting all around us to be discovered. A few stories (within myown 'computer geek' niche) to illustrate this point:Some niches I've stumbled upon...Back in the 90's, I played with the "QBasic" programming language thatcame installed standard on the Microsoft Windows 3.1 operating system. Ieven saved a few floppies of little toy programs I'd done. A whole ten yearslater, I unearthed these relics from some basement box when I was moving,and, now having the Internet handy, decided to try searching for a modernday compiler for this language. Little did I expect that in fact, fans of QBasicwere a vast crowd, with websites and clubs devoted to it.On my techie blog, I mentioned the obscure computer role-playing game"Nethack", almost by accident. It's in a similar vein with Dungeons andDragons, Blizzard's Diablo, etc., but it's about a thousand times as deep andincredibly difficult to win. Well, a few days later, the first of the search hitsfor this absolutely esoteric game began trickling in. From the search queries,I could tell that people were looking for help about how to solve problemsthey'd encountered in some dungeon corner. The more I wrote about it, themore hits came in. Now, in the video game realm, Nethack will never be aspopular as the Sims or Half Life. But since almost nobody publishes about