Another one of my early niche mistakes with a hiking company

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Video Transcription: In this video, I want to share with you all the mistakes I made when I was choosing a niche for another side of mine which was a group hiking website. This video is brought to you by Appy Pie Academy. it was a website where basically people organized hikes they scheduled hikes other people join them it was basically an outdoor activity site the first problem that I ran into is that the group hiking world is largely dominated by mihrab calm and meetup.com is a like multi million possibly a billion dollar competitor and the problem is that it's a loved competitor if it was a hated competitor like like sometimes some markets have a company that's dominant that everybody hates but there's just nobody better meetup is not that meetup is generally liked of course some people don't like it but most people like it so it's extremely difficult to get into a niche where you have to compete with a really popular really rich competitor so that was my initial nish mistake so I tried to differentiate from that my first try was to undercut them in price by going free meetup charges the organizers a small fee and it proved to be too small and most organizers don't mind but I didn't think that and I had this incorrect assumption that if I went free everybody all the organizers would flock to my site and that was not the case and it wasn't even sustainable because if I didn't charge my customers then I was left with the ad revenue strategy to monetize my site and it was actually far less effective than charging so it wasn't sustainable to just run ads and make money from that so I had to try again I had to try to maybe compete only locally not nationally or globally by having more control over what's happening locally and I was able to recruit hikers and hike guides and all that stuff so I was able to poach some organizers and a lot of hikers away from meetup locally but just because I was monetizing with a poor revenue strategy and it was local it still wasn't making enough money for me and I wasn't good enough at different monetization strategies to be able to make this financially sustainable now I'm probably could just because I'm much more savvy in all the ways a single customer can be monetized back then I was still struggling then it's how I try it again the next thing was something called a Content factory today this would be something that would be penalized by Google 15 or 20 years ago a lot of million and billion billion dollar companies were built on the strategy the strategy is basically like you preload your site with a ton of auto-generated pages and they all rank for some keywords so because my site was about hiking I was able to rank for hiking and in every city in the world so that worked for a while and that monetized with ads but it was thin content and it wasn't long term sustainable like today this wasn't gonna be a good business so that ended up not working and then I went into running local outdoor events but like cool events that people actually had to pay to attend and I was the only organizer but I was making like really cool events like there was a popular event that I kept running was which was the shipwreck hike hunt during low tide where I actually went to people on a hike to see remains owned of shipwrecks that were actually on the sand you know near San Francisco which is a major city and few people even know that there are shipwrecks there so it was very cool kind of an event with a fantastic title right like if it's almost unreal like shipwreck hunt hike in a modern city where do you go look for shipwrecks it's like people don't even imagine that's the case or that's possible so that was cool and it made money but I would have had to keep on being the tour guide and I didn't necessarily want to keep doing that so you see how all of these tries I'm trying I was trying different niches all of them had some problem or another and you just kept on trying trying trying now what what would I do if I was to do this business today probably what I would aim to do is turn this into a local outdoor tour company and I could give private tours and group tours and tour companies are great because let's say you take people on a day hike or a date or you show them some attractions you all you have to do is have a minivan or something like that you can take up to 20 people if it's a you know it's kind of a one of those tour vans you can take up to 20 people charge them $100 a photo for the whole day or $200 for the whole day and guess what 20 people at $100 it's $2,000 per day revenue not bad at all and you can do this a lot of days of the week you can tell them additional things private tours you can do a lot of things with this so tour companies are actually quite lucrative and over time you can have multiple vans you could I could hire guides so this is actually a really lucrative local business and I can get even hotels to recommend my company over time and build relationships with hotel so that beep the people who visiting those hotels if they ask the concierge hey what can I do in the outdoors locally then or you know what are the tour guide companies that are available locally they could recommend me and also I can do Google SEO and get a lot of people to find me so there there's a lot of ways to populate local tours of course it's competitive because it's lucrative but it's not impossible and I could have multiple vans going each day which is quite profitable but this requires obviously full-time attention and did I want to really get into this not really it's not my thing I have like another business going so it's not something I'd want to do now but it's something that's totally possible and if I had to start over probably those outdoor Nicias what I would have done is kind of grown them into something like this where it becomes a local tour company.