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.
Content. “Pick a topic and own it.” I published on habits, experiments, chess, jiu-jitsu, nomad life, pricing strategy, productivity frameworks, AI tools and startup strategy. All in the same year. The topics that resonated weren’t the ones I predicted. The audience told me by saving, sharing and responding. The niche found me. After I went wide.
The “just pick a niche” advice is an exploit strategy presented without the explore phase that precedes it.
This is the pattern I’m running right now.
- Go wide. With Multi, I’m shipping to multiple segments at once. Different landing pages, different outreach, different messaging. Real effort in each. I make it easy to measure which segments respond.
- Read the signal. Which segment converts without convincing? Which retains without begging? Which refers without incentivizing? That’s the pull.
- Go narrow. I pour everything into the pocket that lit up. Customize the product, the messaging, the pricing for that group. Become their thing.
- Go wide again. Once I dominate the niche, I expand to the adjacent market. Use the niche as a beachhead. Then narrow again within the new territory.
The cycle never stops. Each “go narrow” is an exploit phase. Each “go wide” is an explore phase. The mistake is thinking you do it once.
Most of the wide experiments will fail. That’s the point.
Failure is the price of progress.
The failures narrow the search space. Each segment that doesn’t respond is a segment you can stop spending energy on. The failures are the finding-out part.
When someone says “start with the niche,” they’re right about the destination and silent about the journey. The journey is messy, parallel and necessary.
Fuck around. Find out. Then focus.
🎲
What would change if you treated this month as pure exploration?
