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Are riches really in the niches?
A practical breakdown of positioning, niching down & finding early customers.
Hey Vibe Marketer,
Last week, two founders from The Vibe Marketer’s community, James Pasmantier and Matt Lok, showed up with two very different products.
#1 James built FounderOS, a command-center agent for founders.
#2 Matt built SlideDrift, an app that turns any link or idea into a ready-to-publish LinkedIn carousel.
Despite building very different products, both founders were trying to answer the same question:
Who should actually buy this, and how do I get my first 10 paying customers?
That brings us to a question almost every early-stage founder eventually has to confront:
Are riches really in the niches?
It can feel almost illegal to narrow down as a business.
The instinct is to keep the market broad, appeal to more people, and avoid leaving money on the table.
But, think about it carefully.
Would you rather fight over price and features in a crowded market? Or work with an ICP that is ready to pay right now because you have solved a problem that is actively costing them time, money, or lost revenue?
In a crowded market, every buyer has ten alternatives and very little urgency to choose one.
In a specific niche, there is less competition and a buyer who is already losing something every day the problem remains unsolved.
You also do not have to work as hard to manufacture trust. When you repeatedly solve the same problem for the same type of customer, your proof of work starts doing that for you.
Niching down does not necessarily shrink the deal. It shrinks the field you are competing in to win it.
Even a relatively small niche can convert faster and closer to full price than a broad audience that is still deciding whether it needs your product at all.
So how do you actually find the right niche?
There isn't a perfect formula, but there are a few patterns you'll see repeatedly.
Look for markets where the problem is expensive. The best niches aren't the biggest, they're the ones where doing nothing has a real cost in time, money, or missed opportunities.
Start with a service before you build a product. A service forces you to understand the workflow, uncover edge cases, and see where people actually get stuck. You're buying product research with every client you work with.
Learn the market before trying to automate it. Understand how people work today, what tools they already use, where the bottlenecks are, and which parts of the process they'd gladly pay to eliminate.
Here is a quick breakdown of our conversation from the hot seat…
Hot Seat #1: What should the GTM strategy look like?
Product : FounderOS, a command center for founders, driven by a Chief of Staff agent that prioritizes your day and helps execute it. Built by James Pasmantier.
Setting up agent teams via NimbleDraft.
Designed for: Founders and small businesses running their own operations, with Hermes layered on top so the same agent is reachable through Slack or Telegram.
Key questions:
a. Who is the ideal customer for FounderOS?
b. What's the best go-to-market strategy for early adoption?
Suggestion | Explanation | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
Don't go after founders and indie hackers | This is one of the most crowded, competitive markets online. It looks big on Twitter, but zoom out and it's a niche bubble where everyone is selling to everyone else. | Avoids a market with high competition and even higher churn risk. |
Watch for high churn risk in this group specifically | Founders and indie hackers are more likely than most to just build their own version of the tool instead of paying for one. | Prevents wasted acquisition spend on customers who won't stick around. |
Target Main Street-style businesses instead | Think consultants, agencies, or service professionals outside the AI/startup bubble; people who feel behind on AI and want to catch up without learning it themselves. | Opens a market with real demand and far less competition. |
Bundle a self-serve tier with a higher-ticket, white-glove option | Offer the product on its own, but also a $500 to $1,000 package that includes a few months of service plus several calls with you directly. | Creates a path to get paid while learning the niche, through hands-on onboarding rather than a cold subscription signup. |
People buy from a person before they buy a subscription | Especially early on, prospects are more likely to trust a new business if there's a human walking them through the transformation. | Higher conversion on early deals, while you're still learning what the product needs to become. |
Get specific about the niche, even if it feels small | Example raised in the session: 39,000 independent insurance agencies across the US specialize in insuring mobile mechanics alone. One of them has more leads than it can answer. | A niche that looks tiny on the surface is often a real, underserved market once you look closely. |
Find the painful, expensive problem inside the niche | Look for a broken part of their existing process, like a funnel that drops leads or a follow-up that never gets sent. That gap becomes your outreach angle. | Gives you a concrete, money-losing problem to open the conversation with, instead of a generic pitch. |
Positioning and angle come before scale | The advice: going broad has failed repeatedly; getting specific has worked every time it's been tried. | Confirms niching down as the direct lever for conversion, not just a nice-to-have. |
Here’s the link to our chat.
Hot Seat #2: How do I get my first 10 paying customers?
Product: SlideDrift, an app that turns a link, a note, or an idea into a ready-to-publish LinkedIn carousel, built by Matt Lok.
Designed for: Anyone who wants to turn existing written or spoken content into visual LinkedIn posts, without designing carousels by hand.
Key questions:
a. Which market should he focus on first?
b. How can he get his first few paying customers?
Suggestion | Explanation | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
Target service professionals who sell on the phone | Accountants, lawyers, financial advisors, and wealth managers at small to mid-sized firms are often responsible for their own book of business and spend a lot of time on sales calls. | These are high-ticket leads; even one new client from a LinkedIn post can be worth far more than it would to a SaaS founder. |
Use the product itself as the outbound offer | Pull content from a prospect's existing site, article, or press mention, turn it into ready-to-publish LinkedIn posts, and send it to them for free before ever pitching. | Removes the friction of a cold pitch; the prospect sees the value before being asked for anything. |
Send it at scale with hyper-targeted messaging | Example script raised in the session: "I help founder-led accounting firms expand their reach by turning what they already have into content that makes potential customers call. Here's a free batch, on the house." | Positions outbound as a low-cost, direct way to reach the exact right buyer, despite outbound's reputation for being noisy. |
Build your own case study first | Grow your own LinkedIn presence in the same way you'd sell it to a client, so there's a real, visible answer to "how do I know this works." | Gives prospects proof instead of a promise, and builds Matt's own platform as a byproduct. |
Combine outbound with LinkedIn-native growth | Post content aimed at the chosen niche, invite comments for a free audit, then follow up by hand or through automated DMs to the same list being emailed. | Creates two channels reinforcing the same message instead of relying on one. |
Be selective about how "AI-native" the target audience is | The tool's bulk and scheduling features may appeal more to people already comfortable with AI workflows, who are a smaller and noisier market than professionals just trying to get results. | Points Matt toward professionals who want the outcome without wanting to learn the tooling, which is the larger and less competitive audience. |
Here’s the link to our discussion.
If you're building something and stuck on the same question, who do I actually sell this to, my next live session with the vibe marketers inside the community is tomorrow.
I do this bi-weekly, where community members discuss, exchange notes, showcase builds, and come on hot seats and get their real business problems solved.
If you've been building with AI alone and you're looking for AI marketing practitioners who are figuring this out in real time, solving real problems, shipping real things, this is your place.
Wrapping up
The market that looks the biggest is rarely the one that pays fastest.
In James P.'s case and in Matt's, it wasn't the product holding them back. It was the assumption that a bigger, louder market meant a better shot at customers.
Narrowing down makes everything clearer. Who you're targeting, what you're saying, what pain you're solving.
Turns out narrow isn't leaving money on the table. It's how you find your market and cash in.
My philosophy hasn't changed: identify the demand, look for the gap sitting inside it, find your wedge, and build on top of it. Test it, launch, iterate, repeat.
Most founders building right now are making the same mistake: chasing the market that's loudest instead of the one that's actually starving for a solution.
The winners won't be the ones with the biggest market they'll be the ones who understand a specific customer better than anyone else.
Miscellaneous vibes
1. If you decide to have a one-person marketing team tomorrow, is your business actually ready for one?
2. Every startup should have a daily markdown file called "what_the_market_is_telling_us.md"
3. How to create a listicle that shows up in AI answers?
4. AI isn't taking your job. It's giving you your job back…
5. Weeks of SEO work done in a few hours.
6. Is opus is getting worse at copywriting with every release?
7. Taste, Judgment and AI…
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