The beginning of J House Media was hard. I mean really hard. It started on the mean streets of Athens Georgia with a couple of guys that knew a little bit about website design and significantly less about running a service industry business. There was little to no experience in the industry, no work at other companies, no parents who were in the industry, really nothing except for some aspirations and some pretty intense determination. But here we are almost 6 years later, building a great company. There were a lot of great flops and failures along the way, as well as some great successes. But for every bellyflop into pool we took, there was a lesson we learned.
One of the things that probably took us the longest and that we flopped around the most on was how to know our niche. For years, we floundered around looking for it. We searched all over the company, we asked outsiders to come and help us, we argued and discussed (sometimes, we even yelled looked crossly at each other). Throughout the whole time, we had our suspicions, but were never really sure of ourselves.
In the end the things that I learned about finding your niche is that it is something you have to grow into. Most of the time, you don’t start off there, even if you plan to get there. You slowly find the things that you are best at, and the market moves you in that direction. We knew at the beginning that we had stronger than average technical skills, and were willing and able to take on some jobs that a lot of our competitors could not or would not, but we didn’t really know if that was our niche. Over the years, because we were good at the technical and usability sides of websites, we began doing more and more work in the area. Over time, we became practiced at it. Now, over two hundred websites later, here we are, a company that can build some complex web-based applications. Companies are starting to search us out to build their apps. That has become our niche. We make the web make business sense.