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Step one: pick five criteria and weights
Choose criteria that reflect both the market and the person entering it. Five work well: audience pain intensity, willingness to pay, competition you can realistically face, reachability through channels you can use, and personal fit or interest. Give each a weight totaling one hundred, such as 30 for pain, 25 for willingness to pay, 15 for competition, 15 for reachability and 15 for fit. Weights force you to state what matters before you see any numbers. Write one sentence defining each criterion so the scores stay consistent from one niche to the next.
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Step two: score candidates with evidence
List three to five candidate niches and score each criterion from one to five, noting the evidence behind every score. Evidence can be customer conversations, forum complaints, existing paid products, ad examples or your own skills. Example: a founder compares freelance bookkeepers, local gym owners and indie podcasters. Bookkeepers score high on willingness to pay and reachability through professional groups, gym owners score high on pain but lower on fit, and podcasters score high on fit but low on spending. Multiply each score by its weight and total the results to produce a ranked list.
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Step three: test the top result before committing
A scorecard ranks options but does not prove demand, so treat the winner as a hypothesis. Set a small test: ten conversations, a simple landing page or a paid pilot offer to the top-scoring niche. Define in advance what result would keep it, such as three people agreeing to a trial. If the test fails, move to the runner-up instead of redoing the whole analysis. Revisit the weights after each test, because early experience often changes what you value. Save the scorecard so later decisions build on recorded reasoning.