Customers & Research

How narrow is too narrow? I keep slicing my niche smaller and now I'm not sure there are enough buyers left.

A starting point

Narrow enough that you can name the customer and reach them, wide enough that reaching all of them can pay your bills for a year or two. If you've sliced down to a segment you can list on one spreadsheet with fewer than 50 rows, you've gone past a beachhead into a single account. As a starting point, stop slicing when the segment is homogeneous (same pain, same buyer, same channel) rather than just small, because homogeneity is what makes a niche winnable, not size.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 3 link-checked Listen Read

Listen

🎧 Podcast

✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it The author of Crossing the Chasm explaining beachhead selection in plain, modern language, the fastest way to absorb the framework without reading the whole book. Lenny's is a trusted operator source.

Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market

On Lenny's Podcast / Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky & Geoffrey Moore ~75 min

Identify a single target segment where you can be the obvious winner
Sequence adjacent markets deliberately, like knocking down bowling pins
Match your go-to-market playbook to the adoption stage you're in
Focus creates the references that let you expand later

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🎧 Podcast

✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it Courtland Allen founded Indie Hackers, so he has watched hundreds of small, bootstrapped founders pick niches and live with the results. His honest counter to your fear: when you go as narrow as you can and actually start, the niche usually turns out to have far more depth than it looked, and it expands from there. This is the practical, indie-scale view of the narrowness tradeoff, useful as a starting point if you are building outside the big startup hubs with limited resources.

Start a Profitable Business in Six Weeks with Courtland Allen

On Software Engineering Unlocked by Michaela Greiler (host), Courtland Allen (guest) Approx. 45 min listen

Going deep in one narrow direction lets a solo or small team build something genuinely better than a spread-thin generalist can.
A niche that looks too small on paper often reveals more facets and adjacent buyers once you are actually serving it.
Layer one addition at a time (start with one channel or one feature) rather than launching wide, so each step compounds on the last.

Open software-engineering-unlocked.com →

Read

📖 Book

✓ Link checked Paid Intermediate

Why we picked it The whole worry in your question, that slicing smaller leaves too few buyers, is exactly what Moore's target customer characterization method is built to answer. His argument is that a smaller, homogeneous segment where budget already exists to buy is safer than a larger diffuse one, because word of mouth and references compound inside a tight group. Treat it as the source text behind most beachhead advice you will read elsewhere.

Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition

From HarperBusiness (Collins Business Essentials) by Geoffrey A. Moore Approx. 256 pages

Characterize a specific buyer and use case before you count the market. If you cannot name who they are and how they buy, the segment is defined wrong, not just too small.
A segment with existing budget for your kind of product beats a bigger one you would have to educate for a year.
Dominating one small segment creates the references and cash flow that fund the move to the next, so narrow now does not mean stuck.

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