# Niche Selection

#concept #positioning

## Summary

Who you sell to dominates what you sell. Every source makes audience choice the highest-leverage decision — the video via "hungry crowd beats best burger", Rodenko via "80% of sales is WHO you talk to, not WHAT", and Tony most bluntly: **"niche is upstream of everything"** — without an ICP you can't outbound, can't productize, and can't delegate sales at all ([[2026-06-15-more-clients-dev-agency]]).

## Current Understanding

**The market picks the offer, you don't invent it.** Don't design a novel service; find what the market is already asking for and name its bottleneck back to it ([[2026-07-17-design-the-perfect-offer]]). The burger analogy: *"Is it better to have the best burger in town, or be around a bunch of hungry people?"* — hungry crowd wins every time. Corollary from the fitness-coaching example: market saturation is never the real problem; the problem is the right offer in front of the wrong people.

**If it won't sell, suspect the audience before the offer.** "Если оффер не продаётся — почти всегда не та аудитория" ([[2026-06-15-selling-development-services-in-the-ai-era]]). Reinforced by: *if even one person bought, there's no reason others won't — the problem is never the product, it's WHO and HOW.* This is a useful debugging heuristic and also an unfalsifiable one; it can rationalize away a genuinely bad offer indefinitely. Hold it as a first hypothesis, not a conclusion.

**Three selection rules** (primary: [[2026-06-15-rodenko-selling-development-expensively]] for 1–2, [[2026-06-15-17-ways-first-client]] for 3):

1. **Sell to leadership, not implementers.** To an implementer your AI is a threat to their job, and you are a risk to be blocked. To leadership, you deliver a KPI. This is the vault's clearest account of *why* the same offer lands or dies depending on the seat it's pitched to.
2. **Go where AI is powerless** — narrow industry methodologies LLMs don't know (Rodenko: "not profitable to feed them"). Niche depth is the moat precisely because the substitute can't reach it.
3. **Specificity beats volume** — "Shopify dev for fashion brands" beats "web developer" everywhere. Against "we do everything for everyone" (also Tony's mistake #2).

**Pick the segment before you build** ([[2026-06-15-making-money-with-ai-2026]]): choosing a target segment is an explicit step *before* implementation in all three monetization pipelines — "solve a concrete pain, don't build a platform."

**The buyer default at $1K+/month: business owners** ([[2026-07-23-make-my-first-100k-in-month]], [[dan-martell]]): small-business owners feel all three buyable outcomes (time, money, status — [[outcome-based-selling]]) and decide fast — no committee. A coarser cut than "sell to leadership" but the same logic: pick the seat where the pain converts to a purchase decision. Same source adds the vault's first **supply-side** filter, Ikigai — love it / good at it (reframed: *what do people tell me* I'm good at) / world needs it / will pay for it — a check on the seller, complementing this page's market-side rules; only "will they pay" overlaps the [[pain-discovery]] machinery, and the other three quadrants are motivational rather than evidential.

**SOM beats TAM — the same rule from the venture side** ([[2026-07-26-how-to-build-a-billion-dollar-company-2027]], [[oskar-hartmann]], added 2026-07-26; vocabulary defined on [[tam-sam-som]]). Investors love a big TAM, but the start must be a **small market where you can take a meaningful share *now***: "AI agent answering calls for HVAC/plumbers/roofers" beats "AI agents for every profession"; Manifest became a unicorn on **immigration law alone**; Fab.com's peak was $100M on design home goods for a loyal base. His formula — *big market + small winnable sub-market + MVP, not a fantasy product* — is this page's specificity rule restated by a **third independent tradition** (VC/product world, after the US coaching and RU dev-sales schools). That makes narrow-first the vault's most independently-converged claim after the core thesis itself. One nuance he adds that the services sources don't: the narrow segment is *for winning now*, with the big market kept behind it — niche as a beachhead, not a destination.

**Both halves of the pincer.** Note that rules 2 and 3 point the same way as the [[productized-service]] commodity test: the narrower and more domain-loaded the category, the less substitutable it is, and the more [[pricing-from-value]] becomes available. Niche choice is upstream of pricing power.

## Evidence

- Hungry crowd vs. best burger; fitness-coaching saturation example — [[2026-07-17-design-the-perfect-offer]]
- "Listen to what the market is already asking for" — [[2026-07-17-design-the-perfect-offer]]
- "Niche is upstream of everything"; the generalist-vs-niched table; stack-marketing mistake — [[2026-06-15-more-clients-dev-agency]] (Tony)
- "80% is WHO, not WHAT"; "sell to leadership, not implementers"; "go where AI is weak" — [[2026-06-15-rodenko-selling-development-expensively]]
- "The most important thing is WHO you make the offer to"; "if one bought, others will" — [[2026-06-15-konspekt-aphorisms]]
- "Shopify dev for fashion brands beats web developer"; niche specificity beats volume — [[2026-06-15-17-ways-first-client]]
- Pick a target segment before building — [[2026-06-15-making-money-with-ai-2026]]
- "At $1K+/mo sell to business owners"; the Ikigai supply-side filter — [[2026-07-23-make-my-first-100k-in-month]] ([[dan-martell]])
- Condensed restatement — [[2026-06-15-selling-development-services-in-the-ai-era]]
- SOM > TAM; HVAC-agent vs all-professions; Manifest immigration-law unicorn; "big market + small winnable sub-market + MVP" — [[2026-07-26-how-to-build-a-billion-dollar-company-2027]] ([[oskar-hartmann]], third independent tradition)

## Related Pages

- [[pain-discovery]] — what you do once the audience is chosen
- [[client-acquisition-channels]] — niche is the precondition for any channel
- [[pricing-from-value]] — the "no money" objection branch is an audience-selection failure
- [[productized-service]] — the commodity test is the same insight from the offer side
- [[ai-market-shift]] — AI weakness is what defines the defensible niche
- [[future-of-engineering-work]] — the compliant-enterprise-harness gap is a niche opportunity
- [[overview]]

## Contradictions / Uncertainty

- **"It's always the audience" is unfalsifiable as stated.** Combined with "if one person bought, the product is fine", it provides a permanent excuse never to fix the offer. Neither source names the condition under which the offer *is* the problem.
- The 80/20 WHO-vs-WHAT split is a figure of speech, not a measurement. Uncited.
- **Tension with [[ai-market-shift]]:** "go where AI is powerless" assumes LLM capability is static. If the AI-weak niche is a moving frontier, a niche chosen on that basis has an unknown shelf life. No sales source addresses this — though [[2026-07-06-sebastian-interview-ai-and-software-engineering]] gives the one concrete example of a durable AI-weak niche (COBOL: no training data) plus a *different* kind of durable niche entirely (the compliant enterprise harness, defended by regulation rather than by AI weakness — see [[future-of-engineering-work]]).

## Next Questions

- What *is* the falsification condition — how many wrong audiences before the offer is the problem?
- Which industry methodologies are durably AI-weak vs. merely not-yet-covered?
- Does "sell to leadership" survive in orgs where implementers hold procurement veto?
