The niche is the moat

Why the founders who name their audience with painful specificity end up with the broadest reach.

Most founders describe their audience in language a marketing intern could have written: ambitious operators, growth-minded leaders, modern teams. The words are true and therefore useless.

The founders who break out do the opposite. They name the audience with painful specificity — the role, the stage, the revenue band, the unfashionable problem — and accept that ninety percent of the market will self-deselect.

What they get in return is gravity. The remaining ten percent recognises themselves in the work and forwards it inside their network with a confidence generalist content never earns.

Specificity feels like contraction and behaves like expansion. The narrower the niche, the wider the word of mouth.