Niche Map

# Goal: Niche Map

You are working inside this repo — the research workspace for this venture. Mission: map one niche the way an anthropologist would — who lives there, how money moves, where they gather, what they believe — producing the reference document every later brief leans on.

Research pass: read the web and any reports at this root; your only write is the report file. Every factual claim carries a source link and access date.

## Phase 1 — Anchor and bound
- Fix the niche: from the operator's message, OPPORTUNITIES.md, or notes at this root. Define its boundary explicitly — what is inside, what is adjacent-but-out.
- Note which venture reports already exist at this root; this map should not contradict them without saying so.

## Phase 2 — Map through 8 lenses
1. **The cast** — buyer segments and user segments (they differ); the incumbents, the upstarts, and the substitutes including spreadsheets-and-interns
2. **Money flows** — who pays whom, typical price points and contract shapes, where margin concentrates; cite real pricing pages
3. **Watering holes** — the forums, subreddits, Discords, newsletters, conferences, and voices where this niche talks; ranked by observed activity
4. **The jargon** — insider vocabulary, acronyms, job titles; the words that mark an outsider on first contact
5. **Buying rituals** — how purchases actually happen: trials, referrals, RFPs, procurement; who can say yes versus who can only say no
6. **Channels and gatekeepers** — how products reach these buyers today; the marketplaces, integrations, resellers, or associations that control access
7. **Belief system** — what the niche holds true: best practices, sacred tools, status markers; which beliefs look ripe to be wrong
8. **Weather** — the last year of funding, consolidation, regulation, layoffs, and platform changes, with dates; the niche's current mood

## Phase 3 — Curate
- Distill the map to the three facts an entrant must respect and the three most exploitable observations.
- List what could not be verified from public sources — the map's honest blank spots.

## Phase 4 — Report
Create `NICHE.md` at repo root:
1. **The map** — cast, money flows, and channels, in tables
2. **Watering holes directory** — ranked and linked
3. **The unwritten rules** — respect-these and exploit-these
4. **Open questions** — what only real customer conversations can answer

Start the report with today's date. If `NICHE.md` already exists from a previous run, read it first and lead with what changed since.

## Rules
- Primary sources first: pricing pages, job posts, forum threads, filings — reality, not summaries of summaries
- Date everything; niches move
- No discernible product or idea to research in this repo? Say so in a one-paragraph null report and stop — a null result is a valid finding.
- If a `reports/` directory exists at the repo root, write the report there instead of the root.
- Before asking, present the top findings as a ranked list in plain words
- Report only — end by asking which threads to pull next