Chapter 6: Finding Your Niche

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Explain how segmentation and targeting work and why a creator competes more effectively in a niche than in a broad market.
2. Apply the niche test (big enough, small enough, yours enough) to candidate niches, using true-fan arithmetic to judge viability.
3. Evaluate a niche-size claim by identifying who or what was counted, who produced the number, and whether it answers the sizing question at hand.
4. Write a niche statement that states the audience served, the work made for them, and the reason the creator can win there.

The Most Crowded Room

In early 2016, Andrew Rea was a 28-year-old freelance filmmaker in New York, recently divorced, professionally adrift, and working through a depression. He put $4,000 of camera equipment on a credit card, discovered that the kitchen was the only room in the apartment with space to test it, and filmed himself making a smoothie (Han, 2021; McGurk, 2022). “I’ve always wondered, ‘What does the food in film and television actually taste like?’” (Han, 2021). Not long after the smoothie test, an episode of Parks and Recreation was playing in the background. In it, two characters hold a burger cook-off, pitting an elaborate invented turkey burger, with papaya chutney and truffle aioli, against a deliberately plain hamburger. “And I thought, what would that taste like? So I tried, as painstakingly as possible, to recreate it to the best of my ability” (McGurk, 2022).

Consider the market he was getting into. Food was among the most crowded categories on YouTube, ruled by corporate kitchens with professional chefs, test facilities, and full production staffs. Rea had no culinary training, and his camera framing cut his own face out of the shot (“I had no intention of being anonymous. That was just where the camera happened to cut off!”; McGurk, 2022). The video was an experiment he wanted to post to Reddit for feedback (Han, 2021). It climbed past 20,000 views. The second episode followed ten days later, and Binging with Babish was born, a channel devoted to faithfully recreating the food seen in film and television (Han, 2021).

Five years on, Binging with Babish had 8.7 million subscribers. Bon Appetit, with a magazine and a test kitchen behind it, had 5.8 million (Han, 2021). By 2022 the count stood at 9.5 million, more than the YouTube audiences of Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, and Tom Kerridge combined, and it has since passed ten million (McGurk, 2022; Binging with Babish, 2026).

Notice what Rea did not do. He did not become a better cook than the professionals. By his own cheerful admission he fails on camera constantly. He did not out-produce the corporate kitchens. He changed the contest. Cooking was a category he could not own, and television commentary was a category he could not win. But their intersection, the food you watch characters eat, was a territory nobody owned, and a skilled filmmaker who loved both could become its obvious source.

Notice, too, that the choice was not a guess. Rea had spent two years posting dinner photographs on Reddit’s food community, learning what that audience responded to, before he ever uploaded a video (Han, 2021). This chapter is about that kind of choice: how to divide a vast market into audiences you could serve, how to pick one you can win, and how to know whether the small territory you choose is big enough to sustain the venture you’re building.

6.1 From Everyone to Someone

In Chapter 5, you built an audience profile, which is an evidenced description of who’s watching and why they come. The strategic question the audience profile serves is where to compete, and marketing has a two-step answer:

Definition: Market segmentation. Market segmentation is dividing a large market into smaller groups (called “segments”) whose members share characteristics or wants, so that each group can be understood and served on its own terms.

Segments can be cut demographically (the countable layer from Chapter 5), psychographically (the explanatory layer), or behaviorally, using what the observe lens shows about who returns regularly and who doesn’t.

The essential thing to understand is that a segment is something you construct, not something the market hands you. The same market can be sliced by age, by motivation, or by situation, and no slicing is “true.” A segmentation is useful only when it changes what you make or how you market it. “Viewers under 25 versus over 25” sounds precise, but if both groups want the same thing from your work, the cut predicts nothing and decides nothing. “People who cook to relax versus people who cook to impress” may never appear on a dashboard, yet it might change everything you make.

Segmentation describes the terrain. The second step is choosing where to stand on that terrain:

Definition: Targeting. Targeting is choosing which segment or segments to serve, and accepting that the choice means designing the work for them rather than for everyone.

For most new creators, the sticking point is the definition’s second clause. Designing for a chosen segment means your work will appeal less to everyone else. But that trade-off is deliberate. Targeting accepts it in exchange for work that lands better with the people it’s for. Chapter 5 showed that nobody can compose for a crowd of strangers, only for an audience they imagine. Aim at “everyone” and that imagined audience is no one in particular, and the work comes across as generic.

Choosing whom to serve is also choosing whom not to serve, and a segment could be chosen for a vulnerability to exploit rather than the value you can deliver. The difference is the ethical line Chapter 20 traces in full. For now, focus on the word “serve.”

6.2 Smaller on Purpose

A company with a salesforce and an advertising budget can target a segment of millions. You are one person with a camera, a keyboard, or an instrument. When you are the whole company, the segment you can serve well is much smaller. That constraint is about focus, not about how large the audience can grow:

Definition: Niche. A niche is a narrowly defined audience, a segment specific enough that a creator can serve it better than anyone serving the broad market can.

Large companies serve mass audiences by averaging. The corporate cooking channel must please everyone who cooks, so it cannot spend a week perfecting the props from one sitcom episode without diluting what its millions came for. That averaging is your opening. A group whose wants are specific enough is left unserved by that averaging, and a creator who serves those wants can become, for that group, the best available source in the world.

Candidate niches often come from intersections. For instance, Binging with Babish is cooking crossed with film and television. Consider a knitting channel for competitive powerlifters, a personal-finance newsletter for freelance illustrators, or a history podcast about one city. Each crosses two broad territories and claims the overlap.

Intersections work for two reasons. Each parent category is too big for one person to win, while the overlap is specific enough to own. And the person standing at the intersection of their own two loves brings a combination that incumbents (i.e., the channels already serving the category) cannot copy without becoming someone else.

Two cautions before you commit to narrowness. First, a niche is an audience served, not a topic covered. Two ventures can share the subject “watch repair” while one serves working jewelers and the other serves the repair-curious. Everything from vocabulary to video length follows from that difference. Second, narrow is where you start, not where you must stay. Rea won his intersection first and expanded afterward, into general cooking instruction and eventually a multi-host channel. By the time he launched his second series he knew that roughly 80% of his viewers were young men aged 18 to 35, and he built for the audience he had evidence of rather than the one cooking shows might imagine (McGurk, 2022).

If narrowing still feels like aiming low, the economics of the internet point the other way. The power of niches has a name:

Definition: Long tail. The long tail is the internet’s demand curve, with a few blockbusters at the head and an enormous number of narrow interests stretching out behind them, each small alone but vast in total.

The term comes from Anderson (2004), and you’ve already seen the shape. The creator income distribution in Figure 1.3 is a long tail, with a few stars at the head and nearly everyone else spread along the tail.

What makes a niche in the tail viable is distribution. The recommendation systems you studied in Chapter 4 route viewers into the tail because it pays for the platform to do so. The combined attention flowing to obscure work rivals the attention flowing to hits. The same algorithmic distribution that makes your reach precarious also makes a rare interest findable by the million people scattered across the world who share it (Kelly, 2016).

Anderson saw the consequence for niche audiences in Netflix’s early numbers. The service, he wrote, had “broken the tyranny of physical space. What matters is not where customers are, or even how many of them are seeking a particular title, but only that some number of them exist, anywhere” (Anderson, 2004). That sentence is the niche creator’s charter.

Let’s consider a creator you met in Chapter 1. Richard Skipworth’s cartoon illustrations serve the intersection of two territories, cartooning and sighthound ownership. His venture runs on greeting cards, calendars, and prints, bought directly by a passionate community that recognizes itself in the work. Sighthound owners are a one-in-a-million appeal in Kelly’s sense, and they found Skipworth.

6.3 The Arithmetic of Enough

How small is too small? In 2008, the writer and technologist Kevin Kelly published an essay that proposed a term to answer that question (Kelly, 2016):

Definition: True fan. A true fan is a person who values a creator’s work enough to support everything the creator makes.

A true fan, in Kelly’s definition, is “a fan that will buy anything you produce.” His examples include the diehard who will “buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book” and the one who will “drive 200 miles to see you sing” (Kelly, 2016). Kelly’s arithmetic says that roughly 1,000 true fans, each worth $100 a year in direct support, can sustain a full-time living from creative work.

The arithmetic requires three things of you as a creator. You must have at least 1,000 true fans. You must offer enough each year (e.g., new work, products, or a membership) that a true fan can spend about $100 supporting you. And the relationship must be direct, because every intermediary between you and the fan takes a share, which raises the number of true fans you need.

One thousand true fans at $100 each is $100,000 a year. The 1,000 is an order of magnitude (i.e., a rough scale, not an exact count). At $50 per fan you need 2,000, and at $200, only 500. Keep in mind that the $100,000 is before expenses. Kelly’s own follow-up survey found the model harder in practice than on paper, and cultivating a thousand direct relationships is demanding work.

Rea’s channel shows the arithmetic in action. Within the channel’s first eighteen months, Patreon commitments reached $10,000 a month, enough for Rea to quit his day job (Downes, 2017). At an average pledge of $5 (Downes, 2017), that comes to roughly two thousand direct supporters providing a full-time living, drawn from a subscriber base above one million at the time. Sponsorship money arrived in the same period (McGurk, 2022), but that was brand money, not direct fan support. Chapter 17 maps both roads and the different ventures they fund.

6.4 The Niche Test

You now have the intersection method for generating candidate niches, a viability bar from Kelly’s arithmetic, and the evidence habits you’ve been building since Chapter 2 (claims need evidence, assumptions get tested, two lenses must agree). The chapter’s framework assembles them into three questions to ask of any niche you’re considering:

1. Is it big enough? Does the niche contain enough potential true fans? Run the arithmetic backward: estimate how many dollars a year the venture needs, divide that by what a devoted audience member might spend in a year, and ask whether the niche holds at least that many potential true fans. The bar is set by your goals. A venture meant to support a team, or to grow past a living, raises the dollars-a-year estimate and required number of true fans. Use sizing evidence of the kind recommended in the Reading the Numbers box.
2. Is it small enough? Can you become an obvious choice within the niche? Who already serves this niche, and what would make someone choose you instead? If your answer is “nothing,” the niche fails this question. It passes when you bring a combination of skills, taste, access, or perspective that incumbents would find hard to copy. This was Rea’s concern. “I was very worried I didn’t have anything original to say, because I’m not a trained chef. And take away the pop culture element, all that’s left is me” (McGurk, 2022). But the pop-culture element plus the filmmaking craft plus the fallibility of a self-taught cook was the winning combination, and no test kitchen could copy it without ceasing to be a test kitchen.
3. Is it yours enough? Is your interest in it deep enough to sustain years of work? Does it fit the skills you hold (or want to develop) and the goals your venture exists to serve? Chapter 2 taught that a strategy is assessed against the creator’s goals. This question applies that standard before you commit. It also guards against the purely opportunistic choice. A niche selected only for its market size fails when the weekly grind of serving an audience you don’t care about breaks your posting rhythm. Chapter 11 returns to what a creator can keep making long-term.

The three questions trade off against one another by design. Widening a niche to pass “big enough” usually weakens “small enough,” and narrowing to pass “small enough” eventually threatens “big enough.” Intersections tend to satisfy both, and “yours enough” filters what remains.

If the pattern feels familiar, it should. This is the third small set of questions this book has offered, after the value proposition’s three questions in Chapter 3 and the platform incentive audit in Chapter 4. It works the same way, as a discipline applied before committing, not a formula that decides for you. What the niche test produces is the chapter’s deliverable:

Definition: Niche statement. A niche statement is one or two sentences stating the specific audience a venture serves, what the venture makes for them, and why those people would choose it over the alternatives.

Look closely and you’ll recognize the value proposition’s three questions from Chapter 3: who is it for, what do they get, and why choose this. The repetition is deliberate. Chapter 3’s answers were untested assumptions, written before you had audience evidence, and the niche statement re-answers the same questions for the niche you have now chosen and tested, with the evidence you’ve gathered since. Like your audience profile, the niche statement is specific (a reader should be able to name a person it includes and a person it excludes), evidenced (the audience clause comes from your Chapter 5 profile, not from hope), and provisional (an assumption in Chapter 3’s sense). Once written, it enters the discovery cycle (assumption, test, evidence, revise), just as Rea’s first video entered Reddit as an experiment seeking feedback.

To catch a weak niche statement, try extending it with “so that.” “I make cooking videos for people who like food” cannot be extended without sounding silly, because it describes a category, not a niche. “I recreate the food from film and television for viewers who want to taste what they see on the screen, so that food their favorite characters eat becomes food they can eat” is a natural extension.

The niche statement records the ground you chose. It does not yet describe how you stand on it. That’s positioning, and it’s the topic of Chapter 7.

Summary

This chapter turned audience evidence into a strategic choice. Segmentation divides a market into groups that share characteristics or wants, and it is useful only when it changes what the creator makes or how they market it. Targeting chooses which segment to serve and accepts that the work is designed for them rather than everyone (LO1). For a one-person venture, targeting sharpens into a niche, an audience specific enough that one person can serve it better than the mass market’s averaging can, and candidate niches come from intersections of broad territories. The long tail is the economic reason such a niche is viable, since recommendation systems route scattered enthusiasts to the work made for them (LO1). Kelly’s true-fan arithmetic sets the viability bar at roughly a thousand devoted supporters in a direct relationship, low in number but demanding in its conditions (LO2). Numbers that size a niche come from platform counts, industry estimates, and published surveys. Each is read the same way. What did it count, and is that your question (LO3)? The niche test assembles it all: big enough, small enough, and yours enough. Their product is the niche statement, a specific, evidenced, provisional sentence that becomes the second component of the Unit 2 milestone, after your audience profile, and gives Chapter 7 its starting point (LO2, LO4). The standing lesson is Rea’s. He did not beat the corporate kitchens at their contest. He chose a contest they would not enter.

Questions for Discussion and Application

1. Food was one of YouTube’s most crowded categories, and Rea entered it with no culinary credentials. Why did narrowing the subject beat matching the competition’s strengths? What did his two years on the food subreddit give him that no market report could?
2. Make two lists: (1) things you can do or make, and (2) audiences you belong to or interests you understand from the inside. Draft three candidate niches as intersections of one item from each list. Then identify the strongest candidate, run the niche test on it, and note which of the three questions it passes least convincingly.
3. Find one number that sizes a market or interest you care about (e.g., a subreddit’s membership, a hashtag’s view count, an industry report’s estimate). What did the number count? Who produced it, and why? What would you still need to know before it could answer “big enough” for a venture of yours?

Semester Project

Write your niche statement and answer the niche test’s three questions. Start from your Chapter 3 value proposition and your Chapter 5 audience profile. Address each of the following:

1. Niche statement: One or two sentences stating the audience you serve, what you make for them, and why they would choose it.
2. Evidence: Evidence from your Chapter 5 audience profile that supports the audience clause of your niche statement, or, if you have none yet, a note that the clause is an assumption awaiting evidence.
3. Big enough: Does your niche plausibly hold the number of true fans you would need? Start with the dollars a year your venture would require. Estimate how much a devoted supporter might spend in a year. Divide the first number by the second to get your true-fan number. Then specify the size of your niche, your source (e.g., a community’s membership or a survey figure), and what your source counted.
4. Small enough: Who already serves the niche? In other words, who would be your competition? What combination of skills, taste, access, or perspective do you bring that they would find hard to copy?
5. Yours enough: Which skills does the niche demand, and which of those do you hold or want to develop? What evidence suggests your interest will last (e.g., what you have already made or done in this area unprompted)? And which of your venture’s goals does the niche serve?

The niche statement is the second component of the Unit 2 milestone, and Chapter 7’s positioning statement builds directly on it.

References