If I had a dirham for every time a founder told me their business coach said "niche down until it hurts," I could probably retire and open a very small, very specific chocolate shop. Which, come to think of it, might be the only appropriate use of that advice.
I get why it's popular. It sounds disciplined. It sounds like focus. And sometimes, for a very specific business model, it's genuinely right. But I've watched enough founders shrink their entire brand into a corner they can't get back out of to know it's not universal wisdom — it's a tactic that got mistaken for a law of nature.
Here's what I think actually matters, and it's not the same thing: positioning. Not "who is the narrowest possible slice of person I can serve." Who are you, specifically, for the people you're for — and why is that clear enough that they choose you without hesitation. You can be positioned sharply and still serve a genuinely broad audience. Airbnb did it. So did one of my own clients, in a market where "broad" usually gets punished.
What the "niche down" advice gets right, briefly
I'll give it this much: vague, trying-to-be-everything-to-everyone brands convert terribly, and "niche down" is a blunt but real fix for that specific problem. If you're currently saying nothing to no one in particular, narrowing your message will genuinely help. That's real.
Where it goes wrong is when founders confuse narrow audience with sharp positioning — as if those are the same lever. They're not. You can serve a huge, varied audience and still be razor-clear about who you are and why you exist. Sharpness lives in the story, not necessarily in the headcount of people it's allowed to speak to.
The clearest counter-example I know: Airbnb
In its early years, Airbnb was, functionally, a listings marketplace — a way to book a spare room, mostly seen as a budget alternative to a hotel. By 2014, that positioning had a ceiling. So instead of niching further into "budget travel," Airbnb went the opposite direction: it repositioned around belonging. Co-founder Brian Chesky said it plainly at the time — the company wasn't in the business of helping people book spaces, it was in the business of helping people belong wherever they were in the world.
That's about as broad and ambitious a positioning statement as you can write. It applies to backpackers and business travelers and families and people escaping their in-laws for a weekend. And it worked, not despite being broad, but because it was specific about what it stood for, even while being expansive about who it served. "Belong Anywhere" isn't vague — it's a clear emotional promise, aimed at an enormous range of people who all, in their own way, want exactly that when they travel. Narrow audience was never the ingredient doing the work. Clarity was.
What I saw with a travel-tech client of my own
I worked with MyUmrah, a travel-tech platform, on repositioning them as the most trusted digital guide for the Umrah journey — and this is, by definition, not a niche audience. Millions of Muslims worldwide undertake this journey every year, across wildly different ages, nationalities, income levels, and levels of prior experience with the pilgrimage. Niching that down to "budget travelers doing Umrah for the first time under 30" or whatever a rigid "niche down" framework might suggest would have thrown away most of the actual market.
What we sharpened instead was the promise — trust, guidance, a digital companion for one of the most meaningful journeys a person can take — and let that promise be the thing that was specific, even while the audience stayed broad. The brand grew past 253,000 followers with a 10x return on campaigns, and what the founder told me mattered most wasn't the growth number. It was that not one person ever said the voice felt off. That's what sharp positioning does that narrow audience-targeting can't: it lets you scale without diluting, because the thing that was never vague in the first place was the promise, not the headcount.
So what should you actually narrow?
Not your audience by default. Narrow these instead:
Your promise. What, specifically, do you deliver that people can name back to you? "We help people belong anywhere" is narrower than it sounds, because it excludes a hundred other things Airbnb could have claimed to be about.
Your voice. The way you say things should be recognizable enough that someone could screenshot a caption with the name blacked out and a customer could still guess it's you.
Your no's. What you will not do, sell, or say — a sharp brand has a spine, not just a target demo.
If you narrow those three things, you'll often find your audience can stay wide open, because the thing doing the converting was never "we only talk to 25-34 year old female fitness enthusiasts in tier-2 cities." It was "we know exactly who we are, and that clarity is contagious."
A quick gut-check for you
Ask yourself honestly: if your "niche" disappeared tomorrow — if that one narrow segment simply stopped existing — would your brand's core promise survive intact for a slightly different audience? If yes, you were never actually niched down. You were positioned. That's the good kind of narrow. If no, and your whole identity collapses without that one sliver of people, it might be worth asking whether you built a brand, or just found a hashtag.
Positioning first. Audience width second. Get that order backwards, and "niching down until it hurts" starts to feel less like discipline and more like actually hurting — your growth ceiling, quietly, for years, without you ever tracing it back to the advice that put it there.
Want to know whether your brand actually has sharp positioning, or just a narrow audience? The free Brand Bloom Audit walks through exactly this in fifteen questions. Take the audit →