My Hatred of "Niche down"

“Niche down.”

Just like the social matrix, there is a business matrix.

The social matrix is a groundless web of ideas that allows society to operate cohesively.

The government and culture influence the school system. The school system creates resources for students to learn from. The students don’t question what they’re taught. The students go on to be parents. The parents teach their children what they know and send them to school. The children make friends and conform further to fit in. The children grow up, get jobs, become teachers, become parents, become politicians, and create the knowledge and resources online and offline that influence culture. The parents, students, and children vote. The cycle continues to create the society we live in.

The business matrix is the same web of ideas that allows businesses to operate how they’re “supposed to.”

You are a human. You learn by being exposed to beginner-level knowledge, then intermediate and advanced.

The thing is, who questioned this beginner-level knowledge from the start?

Are we absolutely sure it is the best way to go about things?

Is it the most conducive to results? Or does it cause more confusion that makes people quit too early?

Those that break free of the matrix can do whatever they want.

But you can’t break free in an instant.

You have to understand the rules of the game and acquire enough experience before you can start playing your own game.

It Never Made Sense. It Never Worked. Until…

When I began my business journey I started with freelancing.

I thought it was the most “beginner-friendly” option because all I had to do was “learn a skill, sell a skill.”

My pain point was always picking a niche.

I’d download free guides and run endless Google searches on the “top 100 niches to target.”

What are the problems with this approach?

• I don’t care about these people. I would (and did) hate working with them. This isn’t a sustainable approach to something as important as your life’s work. You’re starting a business for a reason, and it isn’t to just have a new boss.

• I don’t have experience with their business. Most businesses fail because they try to solve a problem they haven’t experienced. Remember that. Feel free to come back to me when you ignore this and fail.

• It prioritizes finding, not attracting or becoming. You learn a skill for someone else. You search endlessly for people to reach out to and end up spending more time on lead generation than building leverage.

It’s no wonder people don’t stick to building a business.

The business ideologies circling the space have dominated for too long.

They are shallow and lack regard for human nature, psychology, and fulfilment.

I will give you a better way to go about creating a niche of one. A way that is intuitive, profitable, and sustainable.

A few lessons that will spare you a lot of pain:

1) The strong desire to find the best niche is a blatant sign pointing to the fact that you don’t understand business from a big picture. Principles VS tactics, and “finding the best niche” is a tactic.

2) Build a product or service that you would actually buy, use, and benefit from. There aren’t many shortcuts in business, but this is one of them.

Those two lessons are what changed everything for me.

The Most Profitable Niche Is You (Productize Your Mind)

Most people don’t realize that they belong to a very specific niche.

You follow a broad amount of people with various interests that have created who you are.

This is mistake number one when creating your niche:

If your job is to target a specific person, and you are a specific person, why are you narrowing in on one specific interest that you want to sell a product or service around?

No, it won’t make you more authoritative.

No, people won’t trust you more.

At best, you’ll look like a glorified search engine of “actionable advice.”

At worst, you limit your audience growth and can’t leverage a wider network.

If someone only talked about the niche they chose, like training programs for entrepreneurs and executives, they would only attract those people.

This isn’t bad, but it’s such a small sample size, and this isn’t paid ads where you can pinpoint ad placements to get in front of these people.

When they only talk to that niche:

• They have more difficulty at the start.

• Fewer people share their content (they can’t get in front of the right people)

• They may grow to 5,000 followers in a year when someone who incorporated their interests can grow to 20,000 in a year

After 3 years, the first gets to 30,000 and the second gets to 300,000 because of the compounding effect.

“But Sujal, those 300,000 followers don’t care about my product or service. They’re not hot leads. They aren’t going to buy from me right away. They’re useless.”

There is a lot to unpack there.

First, if those 300,000 followers each know 3-5 people that they can refer to you, that’s a 900,000 to 1,500,000 audience thanks to the network effect. All while the 30,000 follower hyper-niched-down guy is struggling to have enough leverage to get out of manual client work.

Second, they’re not supposed to buy from you right away. That’s the entire purpose of an education brand. You help them go from beginner (content) to advanced (product) with time.

Third, nobody is a useless follower, you are just so narrow-minded and indoctrinated with outdated business dogma that you don’t understand that people can learn something new that improves their life.