On the money niche content businesses

By Fiona Boyd |  Email This Post

At the beginning of this year David and I pondered the future of online content and that which we had a familiarity with – niche content, and came to the conclusion that while there might not be that many opportunities to start up a monolith business, like Google, or Facebook, that our experience starting up, growing and selling Arts Hub told us that there was plenty of room in the online space for those who wanted to start and build a business to the several million dollar valuation. That’s opposed of course, to the many billion dollar valuations of Google and the other huge players.

And yesterday I was delighted to read a news story reported by www.smartcompany.com.au that one of the niche content businesses that we mention in our book about how to start up a niche content business, (Niche Content Millionaire), called FindABabysitter.com.au had been sold to the Fairfax Digital division for a sum that was believed to be around AUD$3 million.

We want to say congratulations to Delia Timms and Jeff Bonnes who started www.findababysitter.com.au in 2005 in response to Delia’s own experience with the hazards of trying to find a regular babysitter for her young family. David and I became members of the www.findababysitter.com.au website back in 2005 and were so impressed with the concept, even though there weren’t that many babysitters on there at the time, that David had a coffee with Delia to tell her how great we thought her site was, around the time we sold Arts Hub.

We found several excellent babysitters through Delia’s site – one who was with us for over a year when we had a home/office in St Kilda, and then Kahli who has been with us as a regular babysitter since the end of 2006.

Findababysitter.com.au founders achieve a great exit on their business this week.

So when we sat down to write Niche Content Millionaire, about how to go about setting up a niche online business, one of the businesses other than ours, that we knew was a good business and worth referring to, so we did that liberally throughout the book, was www.findababysitter.com.au

I must say that I’m really glad that our belief that the niche content space has the capacity to yield very decent, if not enormous, certainly very respectable exits to the founders has been vindicated with this business sale. What we believe is that there is plenty of room to develop communities and content that speaks to niche audiences, or deals with a niche interest area, but does it in a really, really thorough manner.

Arts Hub was started by us because we were annoyed that the mainstream media was the only source of information, and a very limited source at that, of news about the arts. Anyone who was in the industry knew that there were just so many important industry issues bubbling beneath the surface that were never reported and so never came to wider attention. Sometimes these issues went to the health of the arts as an industry in Australia.

Arts Hub therefore carved out a niche delivering industry news and jobs in the arts to a 10,000+ strong membership of those who worked in or were in some way, passionately involved in the arts. A significant niche yes, but not a mass audience.

Other niche online businesses that we have become familiar with over the years and about which we also write in Niche Content Millionaire, include those in the stockmarket newsletter space (Marcus Today), an international nanny/au pair sourcing service (Great Au Pair) and an out-of-the-box news and issues newsletter in the vein of Private Eye, which started around the same time as Arts Hub and also grew to a 10,000+ membership prior to sale (www.crikey.com.au).

Findababysitter’s founders were quoted in Business Day as saying that their growth had been around 68% year-on-year. This is to highlight the fact that once you have created the right product or as I like to say, created the right ‘box’ for your niche community, and the fundamentals of your model are robust, the growth of the membership can be sensational.

David and I are big fans of the niche content space. We thoroughly believe that giving people access to a specific service, or type of content relevant to their very specific needs at a point-in-time (when the kids are little) or relevant to a hobby or interest (collecting, knitting, cooking) that we’re really creating more diversity and knowledge in the world and better businesses in the online space.

If you want to know more about the steps involved in starting up and growing an online niche content business to a several million dollar business scale that you can then exit or develop further, then have a read of our book Niche Content Millionaire – a no-holds barred look at how to get going, what to do, what not to do, and how to keep yourself sane while doing it.

And hopefully as we pull out of this Global Financial Crisis, there’ll be more good news stories from the other online niche content businesses that we talk about in Niche Content Millionaire – all of them are worthy of exits on the scale of the www.findababysitter.com.au sale this week.

Image: Flickr Loui Loui

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

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