Watch how she breaks down the problem that causes analysis paralysis for so many, and then carefully constructs the correct path to clarity so you get just the right niche market...
How to Find a Niche for Your Business: Full Video Transcript
Why Choosing a Niche Feels Like Putting Yourself in a Box
I'm guessing you've probably heard that it is super important that you choose a niche for your business or brand -- that it's way better to be a big fish in a small pond than to be a tiny fish lost in a sea of competition -- and that if you want to be able to grow your brand, market your business, make sales, get followers, et cetera, et cetera, then you really have to choose a niche, and the more specific the better.
So you've tried to follow this advice and you've tried to choose a niche, but instead of feeling like you're choosing a good opportunity, you feel like you're just pigeonholing yourself and putting yourself in a box.
The Number One Struggle People Face When Starting an Online Business
I know a lot of people struggle with this when they're first starting their online business -- and often several years into the process. I know because I struggled with this myself a lot for a long time, and also because inside Startup Society and other online business programs that we run, I'm regularly talking to people who are in this exact situation.
In fact, I just finished a series of market research interviews where I was talking to people who were starting their businesses and asking them about what different struggles they were facing, and the number one most common struggle that I heard from them was that they were trying to choose their niche and they were having a really hard time of it.
The Real Reason Niche Selection Feels So Confusing: Two Completely Different Definitions
Solving this problem and successfully choosing your niche starts by realizing that when people say the word "niche," they mean a lot of really different things -- and I'm not just talking here about whether they're saying "niche" or "neesh" or pronouncing it some other way. I mean they mean completely different things.
For example, when some people say that you need to choose a niche or that you need to niche down, they mean that you need to choose a specialty -- that you need to specialize and choose a specific thing that you are an expert at, and maybe offer only one very specific service or sell one very specific product. By default, that's going to impact the content that you create, and you'll probably wind up only talking about one very specific thing in your business, brand, and content.
On the other hand, other people when they say "niche" aren't talking about what you sell or what you specialize in, but instead they're talking about who your target market is -- saying you need to define a very specific type of person who you help. For example: 42-year-old bachelors who eat keto diets.
As you can see, these are two very different ways of defining a niche, and until you even recognize that that's happening and that there's this conflict of definitions, a lot of times that can make choosing a niche feel way more complicated than it is.
Why Combining Both Definitions Makes the Problem Even Worse
To complicate matters even further, a lot of the time people think that you need to do both of these things -- so you need to choose a really specific type of person that you only help in one very specific way. For example, this would be like if you only offered LinkedIn advertising services and you only offered them to 42-year-old bachelors who eat keto diets.
Obviously that would end up being a very narrow market -- a very small group of people who might possibly be the right fit for your business and your services and who you might be willing to work with. So then when you try to define your niche like that, you wind up feeling like maybe again you're putting yourself in a pigeonhole and you're going to be missing out on a lot of potential opportunity and you're going to have a really hard time finding anyone who wants to work with you since you are so niched down.
The Whole Premise Is Flawed: Most Businesses Don't Have a Narrow Niche
Here's the thing -- it's not just that you are having a hard time choosing a niche. It's that this whole premise is flawed. We've accepted hook, line, and sinker that we have to choose a niche as part of the foundational part of starting a business, when in reality most businesses don't even have a very narrow niche.
You don't even necessarily have to have a niche per se, although there are certainly other ways that you should clarify exactly what your business does. And the businesses that do have niches -- most of them develop those niches over a period of a few years of running their business, a period where they worked with hundreds of different customers and figured out a very specific type of person they want to serve.
The Three-Layer Framework: Industry, Value, and Niche
To understand where the concept of niche even fits in, we have to back up and first understand that your business is going to fit into some sort of industry or category. This is just going to be the general space that your business is in -- it could be something like the health and wellness space, the fitness space, the education space, the fashion space, or the gardening space. These are all different general industries, and your business is definitely going to fit into one of them.
Within your industry, your brand is going to provide some type of specific value -- it's going to be a specific product or service. The most important part here is that the way you provide this value is by solving some sort of problem for your customers. Right now we're not yet thinking really about who these people are -- we're just thinking about what it is you'll actually do for your customers, how you're going to help them.
For example, for this value layer of defining your business, maybe you help people get out of debt, or get financing for college, or parent a child with autism, or lose weight, or plant an organic garden. There are a million different things you could help people do, and that's the next layer of defining exactly what your business does -- how it helps people and what value it provides.
Why the Value You Offer Is the Most Important Thing to Define First
This specific value you provide is really the most important thing when it comes to defining what your business is and what it does. The value that you offer is the reason why people will choose to work with you, buy your products, subscribe to your email list, or follow you on social media -- because they want that value, because they have that problem that you help them solve and they want your help in solving it.
What "Niche" Actually Means: The Final, Most Specific Layer
The final layer of defining what your business is and does -- the final layer of your marketing message -- is what I would really call your niche. It is the most specific you're going to get with exactly what your business is and does, and this is where you would define exactly a specific type of person who you serve in a very specific way in which you help them.
For example, where your business's value might just be helping people get out of debt, when you come to your niche you might be specifically helping single moms get out of debt by starting their own small businesses. Or if the general value that your business provides is helping parents with autistic children, your niche might be helping parents with autistic children ages two to six, and the way in which you help them is through dietary changes that help their child have better attention and focus.
Having a niche can be really powerful and it can supercharge your marketing messages, but it's not normally one of the first things that businesses decide when they are first getting started. It's normally something that comes down the road after they've already worked with hundreds of different customers and figured out a specific type of customer that they really want to specialize in helping.
Method One: Start With a Problem You Want to Solve
Now that you understand the difference between industry, value, and niche, and you understand that it is really the value your business provides that is the most important -- the thing you need to figure out at the outset -- let's talk about a couple of different ways you can figure out what that value is and decide on it in a really firm way.
The first way is to start with the type of person that you want to serve. But when I say a type of person, I do not mean something like people with brown hair, or people who live in Albuquerque, or people who like to eat a keto diet. The unifying characteristic that this type of person needs to have is a specific problem.
A lot of the time, people like to help people who have a problem that they overcame themselves. For me, I really wanted to start my own business and I couldn't figure out how to get it off the ground for a few years and I really struggled with that process -- finally did -- and it changed my life. So then I wanted to help other people who were struggling to start their own businesses, and that became the value premise of my business.
From there, your next step will be deciding how you want to help this group of people. Part of this is super obvious -- you want to help them overcome whatever that unifying problem is. But the other part will require a little bit more thought and decision making, because this is where you decide exactly how you want to help them create the result. For example, are you going to provide consulting for them? Are you going to actually do the work for them? Are you going to offer a course? Or are you going to sell some sort of product that they can use to overcome this problem?
Method Two: Start With Something You Enjoy Doing
With this second method, you're going to start with something that you just enjoy doing. This could be writing, public speaking, painting, woodworking, gardening, cooking, child care -- literally anything that you really enjoy doing and are interested in monetizing.
Then from there you're going to think about how you might be able to help people with that skill or service. For example, if you like writing, well, you could write a book that helps people by providing entertainment or some sort of valuable information, or you could provide freelance writing services to publishing companies or websites, or you could write a blog yourself that provides helpful content to people.
For another example, if you like to do graphic design, well, you could create designs and sell them as art, or you could offer graphic design services, or you could use your graphic design skills to create templates and then sell them on Etsy for people to use to create their own designs.
And for one more example -- let's say you enjoy woodworking. Well, you could create and sell finished pieces, or you could teach people how to do woodworking for themselves, or you could offer custom woodworking services for people's projects.
The Final Step in Method Two: Choosing Your Market
At this point, using this method, you will have chosen something that you enjoy doing and brainstormed some different ways in which you could provide value with that skill. The final step is to decide what market you want to serve with that service.
Sometimes this is more obvious, sometimes there are lots of different options. For example, if you want to do woodworking and you want to do custom projects, well then the most obvious target market would simply be your local area. However, if you want to offer writing services and you're thinking you might want to write a book, well obviously there are a million different books you could write for dozens of different markets. Or you might have decided you want to do freelance writing services, and in that case you could choose a whole slew of different industries -- but you will do the best if you choose one industry to specialize in.
Why Clarifying Your Value Is Not the Same as Putting Yourself in a Box
Having a target customer and having that be a really specific type of person -- like I said, it can be valuable, but it's not the first thing you need to figure out, and it's definitely not something you need to figure out before you can start your business. Clarifying what your business is all about isn't about putting yourself into a tiny box -- it's simply about deciding where you'll focus and specifically what you'll offer.
The Two Biggest Mistakes People Make When Choosing a Niche
The two biggest mistakes that people make when trying to choose a niche are: number one, choosing a niche too early, and choosing a niche that's way too narrow, which makes it really difficult for them to find customers.
When you arbitrarily choose a really narrow niche -- and when I say arbitrarily, I mean it's not based on work you've actually done with people and who you actually enjoyed working with, but instead you just kind of dream up this imaginary person who you think you want to serve, and you define them down to their hair color and their age and what they like to eat -- that makes it really, really tough to find customers. But a lot of people think that's what they are supposed to do for their business to be successful, and that's just not the case.
The second mistake people make is that they don't define their product or their service narrowly enough. They leave their product or service very broad and undefined, and they don't clarify the value that their product or service really offers. They don't clarify exactly what problem they're solving, and that makes it really difficult for potential customers to see the value of the product and to understand why they would want to pay for it.
The Correct Approach: Be Specific About Value, Stay Open About Your Customer
When you're first starting out, you need to do exactly the opposite of these two mistakes. You need to define exactly the value you're offering and be really specific about that, but you need to leave your target customer fairly wide open.
Of course, you might decide you want to serve men or women, or people in your local area, or big businesses versus small businesses, or something like that -- you might want to define your market to some extent so that you can target that market with your marketing messages. But just avoid niching too narrowly, avoid defining your niche too early or too narrowly, because that is really going to make your life so much more difficult.
Honestly, if you focus on choosing a specific product or service to offer and on simply clarifying the value of that and what problem you're solving with that product or service, your target market is going to define itself.
I agree that most people don't think that long about the actual transformation they will deliver to the customer, and that complicates the process of choosing the niche. We actually teach the principle of "proof first", in our Proof Protocol course, because I believe the biggest sticking point when you're starting out is not having a clear goal on what transformation you will deliver to the customer, and it affects everything downstream.
If you watched that video, you now have a very clear path to finding the best niche for your business. Grab a legal pad or tablet and something to drink, and go sit in a quiet place and write out your thoughts. You've just been giving a very clear roadmap and explanation on how to find a niche for your business in 2026.
Once you know what kind of problem you're going to solve, sometimes it helps to brainstorm different markets that would benefit from your skills. It can be helpful to get some keyword ideas at this point. In this video, Marcus does a good job showing really simple prompts you can use and trigger words to help you find niche market keywords.
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