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When Mitch Solway first entered the online dating service business in 1993, the "line" his clients used wasn't the Internet, but the telephone.

Teleclassifieds, a phone service, which later became Telepersonals, allowed singles to meet and talk on the phone, and was the predecessor to the highly successful Lavalife online dating service, sold by it's Canadian owners in 2004 for $150 million to U.S.-based Vertrue Inc.

So you might think after 10 years as vice-president of marketing at Lavalife, Solway might think he'd fine-tuned and squeezed as much out of that particular business as possible.

And, in fact, Solway did too.

But as he was pursuing other ventures through his new consulting company Think Mitch Think, he was approached by a friend, Peter Ehrlich, who persuaded him there was another niche to mine in the online dating field: single parents.

"He convinced me the market was huge and parents were disillusioned — that they had such negative feelings about being a single mum or dad that we had to get involved," says Solway. "There was such a compelling need!"

And Ehrlich knew that niche well, because as a single parent he was part of it.

So Single Parent Love Life (www.singleparentlovelife.com) was launched last November and 7,500 clients later, it's proving taking a single slice of a big pie works — when there's the numbers and more importantly, says Solway, "the need."

Becky Reuber, who teaches entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, agrees the main requirements for identifying a niche market are numbers and a "unique" need. And once you've identified that need, the upside is you can specifically target your communications to that, she says. "You don't have to target your offerings or your communications to everybody." The challenge, though, she advises, is learning "what their unique needs are" and "what resonates with them."

Which is exactly what Solway set out to research before launching the company, with Ehrlich, who has expanded his own knowledge of what it's like to be a single dad dating into a virtual business in itself, writing columns on his experiences for the Toronto Star, AskMen.Com, and, of course, SPLL.

What Solway found on the major dating sites, he says, is that single parents were always apologizing. "Hi, I'm a great person but I've got kids," he mimics. And he also knew of a study by a major U.S. online service that found the No. 1 reason people don't contact someone on a site was that they have kids. "As a single parent, you come to these sites, and you know you're second class."

So he knew the need was there.

Solway also knew the second criteria of a credible niche market -- the numbers — was there. One in every four singles has kids, he discovered. "The absolute market size is there."

So Solway set about figuring how to connect with them.

What he found was that other single parent sites were just "cookie cutter" versions of broader dating sites, he said. "What they weren't doing is connecting with single parents and saying: 'We get what it's like to be you.' We wanted to create a space where they could come and feel great about being a single parent, where they're the stars!"

To do that, Solway identified how single parents felt — that they're "gutsy, sexy, sensual and romantic," not words normally associated with single parents — and then he found a Canadian single parent, Emily, who illustrated exactly that and put her front and centre on the home page, and in a video, dancing with her daughter, on the site.

When you click on the site, you see Emily, dressed in a sexy little black dress sitting on stairs surrounded by children's toys. The sell line says: "My turn to play."

Her message is: "I'm a mum, but I'm also a woman," says Solway.

Other images on the site include a man with a soccer ball with the line "Soccer dad seeks soccer mum," and a picture of a "dad" camping, with the comment: "I can keep a fire going."

Then Solway took it one step further, turning SPLL into an information portal for single parents. The site includes columns by Rachel Sarah, a single mum who writes a newspaper column and is author of Single Mom Seeking: Playdates, Blind Dates, and Other Dispatches from the Dating World, columns by Erlich, an advice column called Text in the City, radio interviews between Emily and Peter about the single parent dating experience, and advice from Jody Seidler, founder of Making Lemonade: The Single Parent Network.

In short, the site speaks to the issues single parents face, says Solway.

He further ensured the site "spoke' to single parents by fine-tuning the types of questions users answer when they're creating their site profile to address issues surrounding kids. "There's all kinds of distinctions that speak their language," says Solway.

"For us it starts with trust. They see we made an effort to understand them."

That's exactly the kind of strategizing that will make a niche market business a success, says Reuber. If you're a single person looking at the site, you need to think: "he knows people like me really well, he knows what buttons to push, he knows what language to speak."

And advertisers are beginning to see that SPLL is speaking to a distinct market, he says. Lush Cosmetics, for example, which is prominent on the site, "was very quick to understand this is an audience they can't reach through their marketing," says Solway.

"From a business model standpoint, if we can become the world's largest database of single parents, and we're a trusted brand, we're always adding value for them."

Which is how SPLL plans to make the lion's share of its earnings: through advertising to single parents. It does charge a minimal subscription fee to users — but that's only to weed out gawkers.

Still specialized markets are not always waiting to be mined. "Sometimes you have to develop the market yourself," says Solway. "Forty per cent of our customers have never used an online dating service."

To develop it SPLL is running radio spots — and they're not just directed at single parents, but at their entire networking community. "When [friends of single parents] hear the radio ad, they say: 'That would be great for Bob,'" says Solway. And of course, there's word of mouth. "Our customers are our best advertisers," he says.

In the end, he says every business, when you get down to it, is a "niche". The key is: are there enough people out there in it. And sadly, in the SP market, there is — and it's growing. As a result, SPLL expects to launch in the United States in the New Year, he says.

Meanwhile, other small businesses planning to target specialized markets should consider some of the advantages Solway had, along with his strategies, says Reuber. One is that there's an advantage to targeting a piece of the pie in a market you already know well, as Solway already knew the online dating business. Secondly, you need to define your market expertly, understand how you're going to differentiate it from others, and know the firms you are competing with for the same customers — as Solway did when he researched other single parent sites.

The beauty of a niche in business is the same as that in the environment, says Reuber. Animals adapt to different niches so they don't have to compete with each other for the same food.
Businesses can too!