I heard Greg Isenberg say something on a recent podcast that I hear several times a week.
Start with the niche.
He’s right. I’ve been on Greg’s podcast. I learn a lot from him. The advice is correct.
Start narrow. Dominate a small market. Expand from there.
The problem is nobody talks about how.
“Find your niche” is exploit advice. It assumes you’ve already explored. It assumes the niche is sitting there, obvious, waiting for you to pick it. Most founders, creators and marketplace builders don’t have that luxury. You don’t know which niche until you’ve tried several. You have to fuck around to find out.
The advice skips the messy part. The part where you go wide, try a bunch of things at once, talk to different groups, build landing pages for audiences you’re not sure about, run outreach campaigns to segments that might not work. The part where most of it doesn’t land. Then one pocket lights up. People respond, they pay, they come back, they tell others. THAT is the niche.
The pattern isn’t “pick a niche.” The pattern is:
Go wide. Go narrow. Go wide. Go narrow.
Over and over. At each level.
Amazon started with books. Not because Bezos sat in a room and deduced that books were the optimal niche. Because books were the experiment that worked. He went wide first. While still at D.E. Shaw he evaluated 20 product categories, narrowed to five finalists and chose books because the catalog was massive and no physical store could stock them all. Then he went wide again into every category. Then narrow within each. Prime for frequent buyers, Marketplace for third-party sellers, AWS for developers. Wide, narrow, wide, narrow.
The same pattern shows up everywhere.
Marketplaces. “Start with the high-value niche” is the standard playbook. But which high-value niche? Airbnb started by renting air mattresses during conferences. They tried the DNC, SXSW, other events. Demand spiked during events and died between them. The bigger niche, entire-home short-term rentals, didn’t come from a strategy deck. It came from watching what the market was pulling toward and an investor pointing out the obvious. They had to go wide with event types before the real niche became visible.