How I'm experimenting building a narrower product

For a while now - almost two years - I've been building placemark.io . It's been a mixed success: well-received by the map-interested community, with some happy paying customers, but it's far from covering my cost of living in New York. Part of the challenge of Placemark is that it's in a field with vastly different products, all sort of competing with each other. Google Map Maker, Mapbox, and QGIS are all products to "make maps," but they have almost nothing in common in terms of functionality. Worse, there's no clear customer in the space - lots of people use maps for lots of different things. Every usecase feels like a niche usecase.

So, I'm trying out an experiment - a scratch-built product, adjacent to Placemark's existing offering (real-time editing of map data, like figma for maps): a Figma plugin. No custom data yet, but you can just draw a frame in Figma and get a vector map in a few clicks. Try it out : https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1189962635826293304/Placemark

Here's my thinking: it's a narrower and more well-defined usecase. I know what people want to do: create vector maps for brochures or things they'll print or maybe as part of an existing design. There are places where it can sprawl, but the eventual product that might come of Placemark-the-Figma-plugin is probably 1/10th the complexity of placemark.io

On the downside, it's an untested market for things people pay for - there are a few heavily-funded, hyped Figma plugins like https://diagram.com/ but there might be a stronger expectation that Figma plugins are free than there is that map editors are free (and, ha, there's a strong expectation of the latter, sadly!).

Anyway, it's been a satisfying experiment and seems positive so far: it helps me test a new market without adding features to something existing. Who has done this? Has it worked out?