The purpose of my thesis project is to apply what has been learned in several courses over the past couple of semesters, as well as taking my own knowledge, and past experience, to create a business model and launch it. For the past several weeks, I have been putting together the proposal, and the graduate review board finally approved it.

Below I have briefly outlined what the project will involve, I can’t release all the details for several reasons – namely that this market is an extreme niche market, but there is a lot of opportunity in it for somebody like me and I don’t want to flood the market with other webmasters.

Background

Earlier this year I was consulting for a small engineering firm that operates in a very specific niche market. During my three month stint with them, I spent countless hours just trying to understand the market, never mind figuring out a successful way to help them promote their business. Due to the complexity of the market, it became nearly impossible to really get anywhere without spending a lot more time than was affordable in learning about the market.

It wasn’t until three months after I left the company that I finally came to grips on how the market works and started understanding the business and scientific side of things.

The Market

The target market revolves around a specific science niche which I was exposed to earlier this year. The exact field is very complicated, and usually requires a very advanced degree in science, physics, or mathematics to come close to understanding what it’s all about. I don’t have any of those, so when I was first exposed to it I couldn’t understand what people were talking about – the target market are scientists after all.

During my time with the engineering firm, I was able to attend the biggest conference of the year for this specific market, where some 20,000+ people attended for several days. It was a real eye opener to say the least, but I made some very good contacts there and made a lot of new friends.

Now the real shocker here is that there are thousands upon thousands of people involved in this industry in one way or another (see Market Segments below to get just a glimpse of them). But when you spend some time and do the research, there are very few medians for companies to promote themselves with, and all of them are overpriced beyond belief. Some examples:

• Conferences – this is the big thing for most companies – getting a booth at the major conferences is how most of them get their customers. Booths are extremely expensive, and there’s hundreds of conferences every year all over the world, so unless you are a multi-million dollar company it’s very hard to do this.
• Publications – there are about five major industry publications. Each one is dry, boring, and written for scientists. Each of them has the same subscriber base (about 100,000 scientists). For a simple quarter page advertisement in most of them, you’re looking at $10,000 for a single issue!
• Websites – there are a few websites that serve as news sites and buyers guides for this market. I contacted all of them about their rates when I was working for the engineering firm, and the all inflate their advertising rates to insane amounts (it works out to about $1000 CPM on average!).
• PPC – you can do PPC, and most of the companies do it, but it’s such a fragmented market that it would take you months just to setup a decent campaign. There’s thousands and thousands of small keywords, no big ones. I think the most popular keyword was getting about 500 searches/day according to keyword discovery when I last checked, but you can easily find 100,000+ similar keywords for the market.

If you do the research like I did, you would discover how badly most of these companies are getting ripped off the the small number of marketing opportunities that are available on the market. And the opportunities that do exist, they don’t provide enough ROI to justify the cost.

Market Segments

There’s three main classifications of people in this industry:

• Scientists – highly educated folks (usually a Ph. D in physics or other science fields). These people are doing research projects into medicine, astronomy, technology, and hundreds of other fields. These folks aren’t the source of money in this market, but they are the leaders in the market.
• Buyers – represented in thousands of organizations around the world. The products that are developed in this specific niche are used in thousands of different applications. Just about any company that buys high tech hardware or nano technology will buy from this market. I would estimate there are over 500,000 companies world wide that buy/use the technology in this market (and that’s probably under estimating).
• Manufacturers – there’s around 5000 firms involved in the production of products used by this market. Most of them are high tech engineering firms. Most of these firms are very small, but there are a few giants in them (about a dozen massive companies).

The Website

During the past several months I realized there is a huge opportunity here for somebody to build a industry hub online. It’ll offer some really awesome features that you can’t find anywhere else, the chance to make an insane amount of money, and there isn’t a huge amount of competition right now so it’s a great time to jump in.

I don’t want to make another site that is just going to rip these companies off, that’s just stupid (even though they seem to be getting away with it). I’m building a site that people will actually want to visit, where advertising rates will be fair, and it won’t just spam you with junk that some of the sites offer.

I have 10 months to make this site work, and I’m quite confident I can do it. I have the technical and marketing skills to build the site and promote it, and I have the contacts in the industry to help move it along.

What I’ve posted here is just a brief outline. My actual thesis proposal was 50 pages long, so you can imagine that it isn’t something I can just post the details of here. I will be posting updates here from time to time though in case anybody would like to see how things are working out, and maybe it will teach you a few new things.