How I Found The Right Niche For My First Micro Asset

Yesterday I launched the 100 Micro Assets project.

If you’re new, let me quickly explain the idea behind it.

The goal of this project is to find, build and scale small but consistent cashflow generating assets. (Read this post for more details)

And the long term goal is to make $1,000,000 from scratch in 10 years.

I’ve picked the first niche for my first micro asset

It’ll be a web app called National Pension Scheme or NPS (I’ll explain soon).

I’ll decide and purchase a domain soon. But first, why on earth did I choose this niche?

I used my experience/domain knowledge

Let this sink in very well.

There ‘re hundreds of niches/topic to pick for your assets. But you’ll find it hard to unlock new opportunities if you pick a niche that is completely new to you.

Because you won’t be able to spot the gaps in the existing products serving that niche.

I have 18+ years of experience in the finance and technology field and decided to use it.

I sat down with a pen and paper and started scribbling everything that came to my mind. No filter, no overthinking. Plain simple brain dump of ideas.

Hardly 45 minutes had passed before I had the idea on my paper – NPS vs UPS.

A lot of my friends are in the Indian federal goernment service. And most of them subscribe to the National Pension Scheme or NPS for their retirement.

Like the 401k plan in the United States, the national pension scheme is contributory pension plan.

NPS itself is a fairly complicated financial product.

But in October, 2024 the government has made it 10X more complex by announcing the option to choose Unified Pension Scheme or UPS as a sub-scheme within the NPS.

UPS offers the security of a guaranteed amount of pension after retirement in exchange for a drop in employer contribution money right now.

This has made all federal employees confused.

They can’t decide whether they should stick with NPS or switch to UPS.

This confusion is reflected in their online activities data

Here’s past 12 months Google trends data for the search term ‘nps vs ups’

The upward trend confirmed that people were looking for help to pick the better optio between NPS and UPS.

Next, I went to Ahrefs.

Here also data showed that ‘unified pension scheme’ had quite high search volume and very low keyword difficulty.

Finally, I wanted to see if people were really debating about UPS and NPS. So I went to Reddit and X to check it.

Here’s what I found on Reddit –

And here’s a thread on X –

So people are looking for help/guidance to decide between UPS and NPS.

That’s definitely an opportunity.

My First Micro Asset is going to be about NPS vs UPS

I’ll use this trend to launch my first asset.

I’ll dig further to see what these people exactly want ?

• A calculator tool?
• PDF guide?
• Query solving service?
• Or perhaps all of them?

Depending on what I find out, I’ll start my first project very soon and finish it before July 15th.

More details in my next post soon.