How narrow is too narrow? I keep slicing my niche smaller and now I'm not sure there are enough buyers left.
The short answer
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, your way
3 hand-picked resources, 3 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
🎧 Podcast
✓ Link checkedFreeIntermediate
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.
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.
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.
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.
