Why You Sabotage Your Niche

Everyone (or at least everyone on this email list) understands why starting with a niche audience is the right approach.

A niche puts you on the hook for actually understanding a customer’s problem, which adds a layer of focus to every subsequent action.

If I’m building a dating app for “single people in their 20s,” I can convince myself that there are plenty of single people in their 20s and surely a big chunk would rather go on a double date as a first date vs. meet someone solo (or whatever your hook is).

But, if I say “I’m building a dating app for Steve,” then you have to understand Steve’s unique constraints. Why is dating particularly hard for Steve? What barriers do you need to remove to send his experience from a 3/10 to an 8/10?

Every founder I work with nods and smiles when we discuss this, and mentions how silly other founders who don’t niche are. Then, they tell me that their niche is “women who like tech and live on the east coast.”

The most interesting problem of the past ten years for me is:

Why can’t smart people follow the straightforward advice they know will help them build a business?

The answer, nearly always, is that your subconscious desperately wants to avoid criticism. And specificity opens you up to criticism.

If you tell your friend that you’re building a dating app for people in their 20s to go on double dates instead of solo dates, they’ll love it. They’ll tell you how brilliant it is, how everyone would prefer a double date to a solo date because it’s safer and easier to have a conversation and you can do more stuff - you can bowl or go to a trivia night.

But if you tell them that you’re building a dating app for them, or Steve, a person you both know, you’ll get pushback. Once there’s a tangible customer, it’s clear that your product needs to be a reaction to that person’s life. How they currently date, what’s specifically hard for them, what they want.

Your nervous system is already maxed out at the idea of working on a startup - it can’t handle this type of push back.

So, even though you know you shouldn’t, you go broad. Because no matter how ridiculous this might sound, your desire to not be criticized is usually going to win out over your desire to build a startup the right way.

The challenge here is that knowing you’ll do this won’t fix it. You need to catch yourself in the moment. When your gut pushes you away from nicheing - or whatever thing you know you should do - recognize what’s happening. You’re protecting yourself from criticism which is really just a tight feedback loop. Which is, easily, the most essential part of any early business.