If you have read about technology diffusion [0], then you'd know well to target the innovators (who by definition are on the lookout for new things to try) and early adopters (who are actively looking for a novel solution to their fairly common problem as a competitive advantage / differentiator).

ProductHunt, Hacker News, Sub Reddits are great avenues to find those groups. Another avenue is conferences.

> The definition of a market niche. This is one of the most important lessons I learned from reading "Crossing the Chasm." It has a somewhat complicated definition of a niche, but since then I've had a lot of luck just taking the gist, roughly: If you can name a conference attended by a particular group of people, that group is a market niche. If there isn't such a conference, it's almost certainly not a niche. For example, let's say you were making a web site to help people find a lawyer. "People looking for lawyers" is a market segment, right? Wrong. There's no "I'm looking for a lawyer" conference. Lawyers are probably a market segment (although arguably, not all types of lawyers go to the same conferences). But everybody needs a lawyer eventually, and that's not a niche, that's everybody. "Startups who need lawyers" (lots of startups need lawyers and go to the same conferences, eg. StartupWeekend) are a market segment, as are building contractors and organized crime lords. Maybe you can help them find lawyers.

That said, you must definitely not build in a vacuum unless you have a very good intuition for what people want.

> Your competition is whatever customers would do if you didn't exist. Let's say you're making software for producing cool graphs of statistical data. There's already really powerful software that does this, but nobody in your market segment uses it for some reason; maybe it's too hard to use or too expensive. That software is your competitor, right? Wrong! That software is irrelevant. Your customers don't want it, so even if it's competing with you, it's already lost. Your customers are probably using either Microsoft Excel's horrible chart features, or giving up and just not making charts at all. So your competitors are Microsoft and apathy, respectively. Apathy is probably going to be the tougher one. To find your list of competitors, just ask yourself what options your customers think they're choosing between. Ignore everything else.

From: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20111116

Most tech related products these days use Open Source as a means of marketing and generating demand. Innovators and early adopters come flocking to it, at which point their focus should shift to making their position count via carving out a market leadership position (with strong base already established in a narrow enough niche: think Cloudflare and DDoS; Amazon and books; AWS and Compute+Storage; Facebook and colleges; and so on). Also, consumer (marketing) and enterprise (sales) software require very different mode of customer acquisition, unless you can blend both those in (which is easier said than done [1])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

[1] https://archive.is/R7jqw (how our free plan stays free, tailscale.com)

See also: https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done (know your customers jobs-to-be-done)

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29691811