“I have not met a more committed passionate group of people than surfers. These are people waking up at 4 in the morning to drive 2 hours away to catch a swell window of an hour and go surfing, then going to work after that — sitting in a 5-mil wetsuit in 55-degree water for a couple hours. Commitment level super high.”

Validate niche commitment, not just market size — surfers wake at 4am for a 1-hour swell

For niche products, validating commitment matters more than headline market size. High commitment plus a strong value prop is what makes premium pricing viable even when conventional wisdom (surfers are cheap, golfers are cheap) suggests otherwise. Measure how far your users will go to use the product, not how many of them exist.