'Niche down' is advice that sounds like shrinking your opportunity. In practice a small, specific niche is one of the strongest positions you can hold. A narrow audience is cheaper to find, easier to speak to, and far more likely to feel that you're talking directly to them.
Specific beats broad
'Templates for creators' competes with everyone. 'Invoice templates for freelance photographers' competes with almost no one — and the photographers who find it feel understood in a way a generic product can never manage. Precision is what makes a small audience convert.
You can widen later
Starting narrow doesn't lock you in. Win a niche completely, build proof and revenue there, and expand outward from strength. It's far easier to grow from 'the best for photographers' than from 'vaguely for everyone'.
Use the Words Only Insiders Know
Broad copy tries to sound welcoming to everyone and ends up sounding like no one in particular. In a small niche the vocabulary is the proof. A bookkeeper for "Etsy sellers who've outgrown a spreadsheet" will beat a general "small business bookkeeper" for that exact reader, because the specific phrase says you've seen their particular mess before.
Gather the real language from wherever your people talk — the complaint that keeps recurring in a forum, the phrase they use for the annoying part, the tool they all secretly resent. Put those exact words in your headline and first line. When a reader thinks "that's literally what I say", price stops being their first question.
You don't need clever wording, just accurate wording. The insider term you'd normally soften for a wider audience is precisely the one worth keeping.
Price for the Problem, Not the Market Size
A small niche tempts you to price small, as though fewer buyers should each pay less. The opposite is usually true. When you're one of only three people who solve a specific, painful problem, you can charge for the cost of that problem rather than the size of the crowd.
Consider a course on "VAT for UK Etsy sellers." It reaches far fewer people than "small business finance", but each reader has an urgent, expensive worry and few alternatives, so £120 is reasonable where a general course fights to justify £20. Because you keep your own Stripe on OneSol and pay no platform cut, more of that price stays with you — which matters most when volume is low by design.
Low volume and high margin is a perfectly good business. Chasing volume by cutting the price often gives you more work for the same money and a cheaper reputation to boot.
When to Widen, and When It Sinks You
The pull to broaden always arrives just as sales get good: "if I dropped the niche word, I'd reach ten times as many people." Usually you'd reach more people who care ten times less. Widen the audience and you dilute the very specificity that made anyone buy in the first place.
The safer move is to go deeper, not wider — sell a second thing to the same people rather than the same thing to a broader crowd. The Etsy-VAT teacher's next product is "quarterly returns done for you" for the buyers they already have, not "finance for all freelancers."
The one time widening genuinely works is when you've clearly exhausted the niche and the same buyers keep asking for an adjacent thing. Follow the demand already in front of you, not the bigger market you're imagining.