Secret to Unlocking Your High-Value Niche

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:00]

I have been active on X for only about twelve months.

And, in that time, my follower count has grown from around four-hundred to just over twenty-five thousand followers - that's pretty good, don't you think?

Wanna know a fun fact?

Nearly one-fourth of those followers --5087 followers to be exact-- began following me between 7th and 16th of September. That’s just 11 days, if you’re counting.

And, today, two months later, my audience graph continues to inch upwards!

That means THREE things. One, it wasn't bots. And two, it wasn't a fluke. And, most importantly, three, my content RESONATED with people!

I am almost afraid to jinx it here but  I think I found my "niche" on September 7th 2023.

More importantly, I think I figured out how YOU can find YOURS…

And trust me, it’s not what you think, I promise you that.

Want to know my 3-step process for finding your niche? Let’s begin!


Yong-Soo Chung [00:01:07]

The next generation of successful founders in this digital age of entrepreneurship will leverage their audience to launch, build, and scale their brands. First Class Founders explores this golden intersection of audience-building & company-building with proven strategies to grow both your audience, which is your distribution, and your brand, which is your product.

Because those who can master both will create a category of one.

Hi, my name is Yong-Soo Chung and I'm a serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped 3 successful businesses from $0 to $20 million over 8 years.

On this podcast, you'll learn timeless lessons from world-class content creators, startup founders, and CEOs. You'll also hear tactical tips & strategies from ME, Yong-Soo Chung!

Are you ready? Then, let’s begin!

Yong-Soo Chung [00:02:00]

Today's episode of First Class Founders is a SOLO flight.

So, today I am going to share with you my DETAILED analysis of how I found my niche and gained a 25% jump in my audience in just NINE days.

And it all began with a simple post on X.

On 7th September, I posted a pretty detailed write-up explaining a unique credit-card 'trick' that allowed me to live in San Francisco -arguably the most expensive city in America- on a $0 salary.

And it blew up.

My mentions went crazy. I was flooded with DMs. Believe it or not, I had TROLLS messaging me to tell me how wrong and how stupid I was...

In other words, I had gone viral on X!

But, as excited as I was by this development, I also knew that I couldn't rush to conclusions. So, I spent these past two months carefully gathering data. I watched my follower counts, my mentions, my DMs, and most importantly, the quality of my interactions.

And, I know exactly WHY that post resonated.

Turns out, it's as easy as answering 3 simple questions - one about expertise, one about authority, and one about supply-demand economics.

And that last one, about supply-demand economics? Yeah, that's where EVERYONE trips up...

See, everyone thinks they understand supply and demand. Fact is, everyone --and I mean EVERYONE-- always gets it wrong.

But I know exactly what you need to get it right.

And I'm gonna tell you all the details in the next thirty minutes.

So, jet-setters, buckle up, put your phones on airplane mode, and get ready for take-off!

Yong-Soo Chung [00:03:41]

All right Jetsetters, before we begin, quick reminder here that we teamed up with HyperPods to bring to you a quick 3-min hyper-visual summary of this episode on the THREE questions you need to ask to find your niche.

You can grab the hyper-visual summary for this week’s episode absolutely free at firstclassfounders.com/hypervisuals.

Okay, the first question you need to ask yourself is this:

QUESTION NUMBER 1: "What is a topic or field that I can become the go-to expert in?"

This is usually a subject that you are deeply interested in. It doesn't necessarily have to be the subject you studied back in university.

Yes, degrees are helpful but, if you ask me, real-world experience matters a lot more. You might forget stuff you read in a textbook but you never forget the lessons that LIFE has dealt you. Because those experiences shape you and your world-view.

So, ask yourself, what real-world experiences have shaped you? Because that will tell you where your TRUE expertise lies...

Look at me, for example. I graduated with a degree in economics. I quit a cushy Wall Street job to join the startup world. Then, I combined all my learnings and took a leap of faith to start my own e-commerce business. But I have spent the last eight years building my personal holding company and the philosophy around it.

Enough to be able to stand tall and say, "You wanna know about personal holding companies? Yeah, come to me! I can and WILL tell you EVERYTHING you want to know!"

My true expertise does not lie in economics or decentralized finance. My expertise lies in entrepreneurship. Because that is what I have spent my last eight years doing.

So, ask yourself: What knowledge do you spend a ton of time gathering? What topic are you most likely to correct others on? What subject can you deliver a short lecture on, if put on the spot? What do people approach you for advice?

That is where your niche lies. I have spent a ton of time figuring out how to turn my cost centers into profit centers. I am very vocal about how to design and structure personal holdcos. I have so many ideas, opinions, and factoids about personal holdcos that my calendar of future posts on X is already quite full. And, since September 7th, more and more of my conversations - both online and in real life - are about personal holding companies.

But, and this is key, all of this is backed by eight years of running my own personal holding company with a portfolio of 3 businesses.

But, hold on, I want to make something clear.

I am not claiming I am an expert on personal holding companies. Far from it. I AM saying that you need to have enough experience to call the shots.

To use a basketball analogy, if you are going to claim expertise in playing basketball, you don't need to be LeBron James but you DO need to have played at least semi-professionally.

Take your experience of playing basketball. Combine it with the knowledge gained by watching and analyzing hours and hours of game-tape. And use the resulting perception of the world to teach others about your own beliefs.

And, guess what, this subject that you will end up teaching?

That's your niche expertise.

That's what will get you noticed by your audience.

But, here's a question for you, do you think it is enough to just be noticed by your audience? Do you think that declaring yourself as an expert on a subject will get a swarm of sponsors beating a path to your inbox?

You are right, it doesn't.

That's where the second of our three questions comes in.

And I'll tell you all about it after I take a moment to thank my wonderful sponsors for this episode, CastMagic!

Yong-Soo Chung [00:07:21]

Jetsetters, as you may know, I hand-pick all my sponsors from companies I truly believe in.

That's why when Ramon from Castmagic wanted to sponsor First Class Founders, it was a no-brainer.

This isn't just any tool. This is the tool that gives me back 20+ precious hours every single week.

Say goodbye to painstaking edits and tedious content crafting. Castmagic has revolutionized my content creation workflow.

With Castmagic, you'll harness the power to amplify the value of any audio file tenfold. It's not just about tools—it's about shaping the future of content creation.

I can’t recommend it enough.

Dive into the Castmagic experience now by using code FOUNDERS30 to grab 30% off the first 3 months of your subscription.

Alright, let's get back to our episode on how to find your niche by answering three simple questions.

We just finished answering the first question, which was, "What is a topic or field that I can become the go-to expert in?”

Yong-Soo Chung [00:08:47]

And the second question is:

QUESTION NUMBER 2: "Am I a perceived expert in this field?"

Because it is one thing to build up expertise in a subject and another thing entirely to be ACKNOWLEDGED as the expert.

To continue our previous basketball analogy, if LeBron wasn't in the NBA, how popular do you think his coaching academy would be?

And, if you don't want to deal in hypotheticals, there are plenty of real-life examples that reiterate this brutal truth. Remember the story of the instagram influencer, Arii, who couldn't sell an initial drop of 36 t-shirts despite having more than 2 million followers?

But, when I announce new gear drops on UrbanEDC.com they are often sold out within hours -or sometimes within minutes- of being announced?

The secret ingredient here -and it isn't really a secret, to be honest- is trust.

Trust was also the reason why, in my initial days on X, it felt like I was just screaming everything into a void. And it felt even worse when people with NO business experience would have THEIR posts go viral, while I wouldn’t get any traction on my posts despite me essentially saying the same things!

It. Was. Frustrating.

For the longest time, I couldn't figure out why my content didn't resonate! I had seven years of experience running three e-commerce related businesses. All of them combined were making me multiple million in revenue every year.

Everything I was posting about was drawn from my own experience, backed by my own blood, sweat, and tears! I KNEW what I was talking about!! Why couldn't people see that?

People couldn't see that because, even though I had acquired expertise, I hadn't built my authority enough for people to acknowledge my expertise.

I was thinking of myself as LeBron, when, in fact, I was closer to Arii.

I'm not trying to throw shade at Arii here, by the way. I'm sure she is a lovely person and her fans love her very much. But, when I look at the situation from an entrepreneurial lens, it becomes pretty clear that her audience didn't trust her enough to accept her expertise in fashion design.

The funny thing is, I did NOT have to go very far to learn about trust.

Because I had already done it before with my fellow EDC community over at UrbanEDC.com. My customers at UrbanEDC.com trust me and my knowledge of everyday carry gear. I built this trust over years and years of interactions with the everyday carry community.

And I forgot it all when it came to building my own brand and forging my own trust with the audience.

But, the first step to finding a solution is acknowledging the problem.

And, once I sat down to understand it, I realized that my problem was actually two-fold.

I had no authority.

I also had no audience.

And, as you may have guessed, I needed to build my audience first so that I could position myself as an authority on my niche subject, personal holding companies.

But, how DO you build an audience?

Do you "build your product and hope they will come"? Or do you go out and drag them over?

Well, as is the case with many things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

You build your product. You invite them, perhaps entice them. Then, when they come over, you blow their mind.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:01:57]

In my case, my product was the knowledge of personal holding companies I had acquired over the years. I wanted people to acknowledge my expertise, remember?

So, I followed the industry-standard design process for marketing a product.

First, I made the packaging look really attractive. That is, I spruced up my X profile and made it look and feel attractive to any entrepreneur, founder, or creator looking to build their own personal holding company.

Second, I built a distribution network. I reached out to industry-peers and built relationships with them. I found myself ride-or-die partners. I found myself a cohort of similar-minded people and we egged each other on to improve all the time - shout out to my buddy, the wonderful storyteller, Parker Worth, by the way!

Third, and most important really, I focused on my content and made sure top-quality. I did painstaking research to produce original content. I differentiated all my content enough to make it stand out. I QC-ed every bit of content I created - whether it was twitter, newsletter, or podcast. I checked and double-checked everything before posting. I made sure to post constantly and consistently.

Can you guess what you get when you combine high-standards of product-quality with attractive packaging and a robust distribution network?

Yup, you get audience approval.

Or, in other words, perceived authority!

So, yeah, to bring back our basketball analogy, just like LeBron had to prove his talents on the basketball court, I too had to prove my expertise to my audiences.

And just like LeBron, I too did it constantly and consistently, which resulted in two crucial things. One, my audience became aware of my expertise. And, two, my audience looked to me as an authority on the subject of my expertise.

All that was left to do was to leverage this awareness and authority and, to do that, I used one of the oldest lessons in the book - the demand and supply curve from Econ 101.

I 'manufactured' -and I want you to imagine me doing air quotes here- I quote-unquote, 'manufactured' strong demand for something that I KNEW was in very short supply.

I'll tell you what that 'something' was and how I manufactured demand for it in just a bit. But, while I have your attention, I want to tell you about something that will help YOU greatly with meeting your customer demand.

I'm talking about my 3PL venture GrowthJet!

Yong-Soo Chung [00:14:24]

E-commerce fulfillment is a pain. One time, one of my customers emailed me asking me why we had shipped them an empty box. It turns out the 3PL had stolen the $1,000 product and shipped an empty box to my customer. Yeah, that was not fun.


So, I launched GrowthJet, a Climate-Neutral Certified third-party logistics company for e-commerce brands.

We can pick, pack, and ship your orders from our warehouse in Brisbane, California While having direct access to our team on-site, we take great pride in our customer experience. Just ask our current partners. They absolutely love us.

GrowthJet is the 3PL that I wish I had when I launched my own brand, Urban EDC.
If you have an e-commerce shop, check out GrowthJet and hit me up!

Alright, let's get back to our episode, where we are discussing how to find YOUR niche by asking yourself THREE simple questions!

Before this break, I was telling you about how I was able to quote-unquote, 'manufacture' demand for 'something' that I KNEW was in short supply.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:15:44]

But what exactly WAS this 'something', you ask?

Well, it was my extensive knowledge, experience, and expertise about personal holding companies!

Let me explain.

When I started my journey as a content creator, I was an entrepreneur looking to share the knowledge I had acquired over the years with other people who were hoping to become entrepreneurs, founders, and creators. The market indicated to me that there was enough demand for this knowledge. But, there is also ample supply. If you don't believe me, run a quick search on Apple podcasts and you will be able to confirm this fact.

Instead of stepping back and researching quietly, I decided to iterate and build in public. I tried different angles and spoke about different topics within the entrepreneurship niche, until I landed on the topic of personal holding companies.

My conversations and interactions around this subject were clearly indicative of TWO things.

One, this was definitely a niche expertise. And two, it was intriguing enough that people wanted to hear more of it.

And that's when I knew that personal holding companies were MY niche.

If that feels anti-climactic to you, I want you to stop and think about the implications for a minute.

Not only did I find myself a niche expertise but I also built an audience and established my authority around it! And, what's more, I was able to get people curious enough to ask me for MORE of it!

If you are still not sure, no problem! Let's look at it from the lens of a supply-demand curve.

You already know that prices for a product or service are controlled by one of two things - high demand or low supply. When something is in high demand, prices go up. Similarly, when something is in low supply, prices go up.

Econ 101, right?

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:25]

One obvious inference of this situation is that, when a product is BOTH low demand and high supply, it commands premium prices.

Take the example of ChatGPT.

When ChatGPT started it was completely uncharted territory. But, it was intriguing enough that people wanted to know more about it. Except there were very few people who could speak with any authority about it.

ChatGPT was in high demand and prompt engineers were in low supply. As a result, anybody who learned prompt engineering quickly, managed to make a TON of money with courses.

And, while the situation with ChatGPT occurred naturally, there have been instances when such situations have been engineered into existence.

For example, companies use this concept all the time! When they create special editions of their products, they are basically saying to you, "Our products are usually in high demand. But, we have created a variant of our product, for which we are deliberately keeping the supply low. Therefore, we are justified in charging a premium for this product."

Heck, we drop lots of limited edition stuff regularly on UrbanEDC.com - especially around this time - that is, the holidays! Or, if you want something closer to YOUR daily experiences, think about how almost everything these days is, quote-unquote, 'built with AI'.

I know what you are thinking. "But this is artificial scarcity! Isn't that, like, a bad thing?"

Not quite.

Look I hate artificial scarcity too when it affects goods and services that qualify as basic needs. But we aren't talking about basic needs here, are we?

In this scenario, I would argue that this is just the free market in action. A company introduces a new product. The consumer ultimately gets to decide if it is priced fairly. Simple as that.

Along the same lines, I introduced the concept of personal holding companies to my audience. THEY decided that it was a topic they wanted to know more about. So, I offered myself to them as someone who had extensive experience in building my personal holding company over the last eight years.

Now, here comes the crucial component of this puzzle - pay close attention to this bit...

Like any entrepreneur, I, too wanted to sell my product at a premium, So, I first needed to ensure that the market for it was high demand, low supply.

So, first, I established my expertise. Then, I built my authority by frequently posting about my expertise. Over time, it became clear to my audience that there were very few people with this expertise. And I became the go-to expert for my audience.

In other words, I manufactured a high demand, low supply market for my product.

But, I still needed ONE, FINAL ingredient - a spark to ignite things, to kick things off. 

And that spark came in the form of an X-post (long-xeet?) that I posted on the 7th of September.

In that post, I outlined how my personal holding company philosophy had helped me turn my cost-centers into profit centers, which -obviously- immediately resonated with everyone who came across the post.

I mean, I was basically telling people that their expenses could actually be tax-deductible, which would leave them with MORE money! Tell me who WOULDN'T want to know about that?

Like I said, this is Econ 101! Supply vs demand curves rock!

Yong-Soo Chung [00:20:42]

And THAT can be summed up in the third question you need to ask yourself - which is actually a two-parter:

QUESTION NUMBER 3 PART 1: "How much do people care about this?"

The first part will tell you how much demand there exists within the niche you are looking to explore. That is, do people care enough to pay a premium for the product or service you are planning to introduce?

The second part tells you about the existing supply. That is, who is your competition and how much resistance you can expect from the market.

And, that jet-setters is how you can find your OWN niche with 3 simple questions.

QUESTION NUMBER 1: "What is a topic or field that I can become the go-to expert in?

QUESTION NUMBER 2: "Am I a perceived expert in this field?"

...and the two-parter third question:

QUESTION NUMBER 3 PART 1: "How much do people care about this?"
QUESTION NUMBER 3 PART 2: "Who are the other big players?"

I have pinned the post that started all of this on my X profile @YongsSooChung - I'll leave a link in the show notes if you want to check it out.

Oh, and by the way, if you are really curious about personal holdcos and would like to know more about how to build your own personal holdco, I made a detailed episode on the subject where I have outlined a clear, step-by-step process to building your own personal holdco.

It is episode 53 of this podcast and it is titled, "The Rise of Personal Holding Companies: Exploring the Future of Entrepreneurship" - I strongly recommend you queue it up next in your podcast player.

Next week's episode on First Class Founders will be COPILOTED by Parker Worth. Parker spoke about his incredible journey from being a high-school dropout who was 'barely scraping by' to an amazingly popular storyteller with a course that made him $22,000 at launch. Follow the show in your favorite podcast player to get it automatically when the episode releases.

And that's a wrap for today's episode, I'll see you next time on First Class Founders!