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Companion to "Pick the Niche, Pick the Reader."
A niche is a reader plus an outcome, not a topic. "Supply chain" is a topic. "Procurement managers at mid-size manufacturers who need to know which disruptions will actually hit their contracts" is a niche.
Take your territory through three questions, then write the sentence and tape it above your desk: every future decision (cadence, price, paywall placement) gets tested against it.
| Question | Your answer |
|---|---|
| Who inside the territory has a recurring problem that costs them money, time, or sleep? | |
| What decision do they make weekly or monthly where better judgment changes the outcome? | |
| Are they reachable: do they gather anywhere, read anything, belong to any professional identity? | |
| The sentence: [reader] + [outcome] + [cadence], one line |
| Test | Pass condition | Pass? | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| The buyer test | Someone in the niche already spends money on information (paid newsletters, trade publications, paid communities, ticketed conferences). Competition is a green light. | ☐ | |
| The fifty-issues test | List ten issue ideas in fifteen minutes, and believe you could list fifty over time. If ten was a struggle, the niche is too thin or you are too far from it. | ☐ | |
| The access test | You can name where these readers already gather: trade association, subreddit, LinkedIn culture, Slack, annual expo. "Nowhere I know of" is hard mode chosen unnecessarily. | ☐ | |
| The insider test | For your top three issue ideas you can write the one sentence only someone who worked inside this world could write. | ☐ |
| Name pattern used: reader + territory (e.g. "The FT Compliance Brief" shape) or plain descriptive language a stranger parses in two seconds | |
| Who it is for stated in the one-line description (platform bio, welcome email, landing page) | ☐ |
| Name checked against established publications in the niche (a trademark argument is a stupid way to lose a year of reputation) | ☐ |
| No "musings," "thoughts," or first-name-only branding (the everything publication; not clear in one minute who it is for and what they get) | ☐ |
Frame narrower: you may touch twenty subjects a year; the frame stays fixed. Readers subscribe to a destination. Your corporate exit is the advantage: the industries you worked inside are full of exactly this reader, and you already speak their dialect.