Niche down. Then niche down further. That was the advice, from business coach after business coach, each of them delivering it like they’d just invented fire.
So I did it. I had a crack at a drop shipping business selling trail running and orienteering gear. Then I niched down again. And again. Until all I was doing was selling belts that hold race bibs.
They were the best selling product on the site by a mile. Admittedly the site sold about four things, and it was a terrible business (great experiment, terrible business). But that’s not why I killed it.
I killed it because it was boring. I had optimised my way into a job I didn’t want, flogging something I didn’t care about, to a faceless group of people I had little in common with.
A niche small enough to dominate is usually small enough to bore you to death.
But hang on, aren’t you the midlife pivot guy?
That’s fair, I have picked a road to play on.
I just don’t think of it as a one lane country road with a locked gate at either end. It’s a motorway. The mission here is to be broad on purpose: I write and talk about how to live deliberately, stay curious, and stay relevant. That covers your work, your money, what you read, who you give your time to, and is something I’m engaged with and is a subject I feel I have something to offer on.
So if something grabs me, I’m going to write about it. If I meet someone interesting and think you’d want to hear from them, they’re getting an episode whether or not they tick the right demographic box. It’s my party and I’ll do what I want to.
You’ve already taken the long road
David Epstein wrote a whole book about this, called Range. His argument is that specialists only win in what he calls “kind” learning environments, the ones with fixed rules and instant feedback. Chess. Golf. Everything else, which is to say most of adult life and nearly all of business, is a “wicked” environment. The rules and the environment can change halfway through.
In wicked environments the people who do best took the long road. Broad experience, slow specialisation, ideas brought together from a lifetime of experience.
Which should be reassuring, because at 45 plus the long road is the only one any of us has taken. You’ve done three careers, sat through two recessions, managed people, lost people, and picked up a strange amount of knowledge about at least one thing nobody would guess. This is experience, this is the thing that can set you apart from the crowd.
People find you for the niche. They stay for the person.
Here’s the bit all those coaches forget to tell you. The niche is how people find you. It was never meant to be who you are.
Someone finds you because they searched for a specific problem. Fine, that’s the door. But nobody sticks around for a search result. They stay because of how you think, what makes you laugh and the fact you admitted what didn’t work.
Every publication or business you love is like this. You didn’t stay subscribed for the topic. You stayed for the voice the thing that continued to hold your attention.
The niche gets you found. The human gets you followed.
Hold the mission tight, but the topics loose
Pick a mission rather than a category. “Race bib belts” is a category. “Living deliberately and staying relevant” is a mission and it has lanes. If you can’t describe what you’re doing in one sentence, you don’t have a mission. You have a category.
Then hold the mission tight and the topics loose. A tangent is fine if it serves the mission. Twelve unconnected tangents in a row though will see you heading off the motorway and up the garden path.
And keep yourself in it. The personal opening, the failed business, the thing you got wrong. For most people, that is the useful content itself, they want to hear from you.
Give this a go
Write your mission in one sentence, then tell someone. If they nod, it’s a mission. If they ask “so what do you post about?”, it’s still a category and you’ve got more work to do.
Then publish one piece this week that’s a lane over from your usual. Not off the motorway entirely. Just the next lane. Watch what happens. In my experience the sideways ones outperform the on-brief ones more often than you might think.
Narrowed out of the fun
Niching down works right up until the point you’ve narrowed yourself out of the thing you enjoy.
You’re not a category. You’re a person with a decent amount of mileage and a few opinions worth hearing.
Get in the other lane occasionally.