You know what is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face when starting your business? Committing to a niche of customers who are most interested in your product or service. You need to focus on a niche!

Dave Novelli shares why niching down your business clarifies your mission and makes every decision you have to make easier.

He’s is the founder of Ultraviolet Analytics, a data science consultancy that helps small and medium-sized businesses find ways to use their data to grow their business.

There are a ton of great lessons in our conversation including:

What big data is all about and how it can help you grow your business.
Criteria he uses to find clients that excite him.
How a 3-month backpacking trip helped him break free from his cubicle as a software engineer.
Questions he asked himself when he decided to work for himself.
How to manage imposter syndrome.

Life Skills That Matter In This Episode

Self-awareness.
Self-directed learning.
Building community.

How Dave Works and Thinks

Wake up time: Tries for between 5:30-6:30am.
Core work activities + habits: 1) Programming. 2) Communicating with current clients. 3) Networking to expand new opportunities.
Superpower: Being stubborn and not giving in to challenges.
Definition of success: Not having to go get a job and persisting through the challenges.
90-day goal: Complete market research and create a barebones MVP for a new product.

Inspirational Quotes

“I help small businesses and startups figure what to do with the data they have and how to collect new data so that they can do really interesting things.”

“Make your users happy by giving them what they want and not wasting their time with stuff that they don’t want and everybody wins.”

“Before that, I had traveled on another backpacking trip for three months and before that about eight years of being a cubicle dwelling software engineer.”

“Traveling, itself, builds a confidence in your independence.”

“I started with, what do I want to do for people? What skillset do I have? What type of clients do I think would be, in general, best for me to be working with, that I would enjoy the most? And then from that, I just put together a web page.”

“Everything is so much easier when you shrink your focus as much as you can.”