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Hey rebel solopreneurs 🦸♀️🦸♂️
Started a consulting business about "marketing."
Got three clients in the first month.
Then spent the next six months chasing anyone who would pay.
A different industry every week. A different problem every week. No referrals. No momentum.
The work was fine.
The niche was the problem.
"Marketing" isn't a niche. It's a category. And categories don't attract clients — niches do.
There's a fix — and it takes 15 minutes.
⛳️ Here's the scenario
Meet Lisa.
Seven years as an HR consultant at a mid-size tech company.
She'd helped hire hundreds of people, build onboarding systems, and cut staff turnover from 40% to 11% in two years.
She knew her stuff cold.
So she went solo.
She offered HR consulting to help businesses "build better teams."
She got her first few clients through old colleagues — then hit a wall.
No referrals coming in. No clear pattern to follow. She was cold-emailing anyone who might need HR help, taking every call, quoting every project.
Retail businesses. Law firms. Construction companies. Software startups.
Every engagement felt like starting from scratch.
Three months in, she was exhausted and no clearer on who she was actually for.
One Sunday morning, she was sitting on a park bench near her apartment, laptop open, staring at a blank proposal doc.
An older woman sat down beside her.
Gray jacket. Reading glasses on a chain. A paperback with a cracked spine.
She glanced at Lisa's screen.
"Trying to figure out who you help?"
Lisa explained everything. The consulting, the random clients, the exhaustion.
The woman nodded slowly.
Turned out she'd spent 25 years running brand strategy for Fortune 500 companies — and built her own consulting practice from scratch after leaving. (Lisa went quiet for a solid five seconds.)
She asked Lisa to describe her best client — the one she'd helped the most.
"A 40-person SaaS company. First-time founder. Lost three people in 90 days. No processes. Didn't even know where to start."
The woman smiled and wrote something on the back of a coffee receipt.
❌ What Lisa had: "HR consultant helping companies build better teams."
✅ What it became: "I help bootstrapped SaaS founders stop early-team turnover before it kills their momentum — with a 90-day onboarding system built in one afternoon."
Same expertise. Completely different business.
"How did you do that?"
"Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole wrote about this — they call it Category Creation. I've used the framework for years."
She explained three things — slowly, like she was talking to someone who had never thought about positioning before.
💡 "First — 'better' is the most expensive word in your niche.
If you say you're better than someone else, you're still fighting on their turf.
The only way out is to be different — a different problem, a different audience, or a different solution.
Pick one. Go all the way."
💡 "Second — the more specific your niche, the easier every part of your business gets.
Specific niches attract the right clients without you chasing them.
They make your offer obvious. Your pricing fair. Your referrals automatic.
'HR consulting' is a job description. 'Reducing 90-day turnover for bootstrapped SaaS founders' is a business."
💡 "Third — your niche isn't just who you help. It's the combination of who, what, and how.
A specific person, a specific painful problem, and a solution nobody else is offering — that's when you stop competing and start being the only option."
Then she pushed the receipt across the bench.
"Three prompts. Run them in order. You'll have a real niche in 15 minutes."
Here's what each prompt does:
▶️ Prompt 1 — Find your problem and audience: Takes your broad topic and surfaces the top problems people face — then finds the most underserved audiences who need a solution and are willing to pay for it.
▶️ Prompt 2 — Find your unconventional solution and niche: Takes your problem and audience and surfaces overlooked solutions — then niches everything down using 7 proven methods until you're too specific to ignore.
▶️ Prompt 3 — Build your complete niche definition: Takes everything from the first two prompts and outputs a complete niche summary — audience, problem, solution, benefits, and a one-sentence niche statement you can build your whole business around.
Lisa opened her AI sidekick and got to work.
🎯 Step 1: Find your problem and audience
⏱️ 5 minutes
This prompt takes your broad topic and does two things: it surfaces the top problems people face in that space, then finds the most underserved audiences — groups who need help badly but most consultants walk right past.
"Underserved" just means overlooked. These are real people with a real painful problem who aren't getting help because they're too specific or too small for most providers to bother with. That gap is where the opportunity is.
My broad topic: {e.g. HR consulting, personal finance, content marketing}
Step 1: List the top 10 problems people face in this topic.
Use no more than 10 words for each problem.
Be specific — vague is useless.
Step 2: For this problem — {e.g. high staff turnover in early-stage startups} —
list 10 underserved audiences who face this problem and are willing to pay for a solution.
Focus on overlooked groups that most consultants or service providers ignore.
Use no more than 10 words per audience.
No generic groups like "small business owners."
Be specific about who they are, what stage they're at, and what situation they're in.
Lisa ran the prompt with her topic: HR consulting.
The AI surfaced ten problems. She picked the one she knew best: early employee turnover killing startup momentum.
Then the underserved audience list came back — and one stopped her cold.
Here's what changed:
❌ Before: "Companies that need HR help. Startups. Growing businesses."
✅ After: "Bootstrapped SaaS founders who just made their first 3–5 hires and are watching their best people walk out within 90 days.
No HR background. No processes. No idea why it keeps happening."
That wasn't just more specific.
That was a person she could picture standing in front of her.
She knew their industry. Their stage. Their exact moment of panic.
But knowing the audience was only half the job. The real unlock was finding a solution nobody else was offering.
That's Step 2.
🔍 Step 2: Find your unconventional solution and niche
⏱️ 5 minutes
This prompt takes the problem and audience from Step 1 and does two things. First, it surfaces ten solutions — including the weird, overlooked ones most people skip right past. Second, it niches everything down using 7 proven methods until the niche is so specific that the right person reads it and immediately thinks: this is exactly for me.
"Niching down" just means getting more specific — narrowing who you help, how you help them, or what situation they're in — until there's no room for confusion about who your business is for.
My topic: {e.g. HR consulting}
My problem: {e.g. early employee turnover killing startup momentum}
My audience: {e.g. bootstrapped SaaS founders with their first 3-5 hires}
Step 1: List 10 possible solutions to this problem for this audience.
Include the unconventional and overlooked ones — not just the obvious.
Use no more than 10 words per solution.
Then, for this solution — {e.g. 90-day onboarding system built in one afternoon} —
give me 21 niches using these 7 proven ways to niche down (3 niches each):
1. By price (e.g. done-for-you, DIY template, group program)
2. By industry (e.g. healthcare, SaaS, e-commerce)
3. By location (e.g. US-based, remote-first teams, European startups)
4. By experience (e.g. first-time founder, serial entrepreneur)
5. By situation (e.g. just raised funding, pre-revenue, scaling fast)
6. By demographic (e.g. solo founder, female founder, immigrant founder)
7. By specific problem (e.g. turnover, burnout, culture breakdown)
For each niche, make clear WHO the audience is and WHAT situation they're in.
Use 10 words or less per niche.
Be so specific that someone reads it and immediately thinks "that's me."
Lisa picked the solution that surprised her most: a 90-day onboarding system a founder could build in one afternoon — no HR experience needed.
The 21 niches came back.
Three stopped her cold.
Here's what changed:
❌ Before: "By industry: tech startups, software companies, SaaS businesses."
✅ After: "By situation: Bootstrapped SaaS founders who just lost their second hire in 60 days.
By experience: First-time technical founders with zero HR background hiring their first team.
By problem: Founders whose best early hire quit before the product shipped."
Each one felt like a real person in a real moment of panic.
Not a category. A person.
Now she had a niche. She just needed words that made it unmissable.
That's Step 3.
🧠 Step 3: Build your complete niche definition
⏱️ 5 minutes
This prompt takes everything from Steps 1 and 2 and builds a complete niche definition — a full picture of who you help, what you solve, how you solve it differently, and the benefits your clients walk away with.
A niche definition is the foundation you build everything else on. Your offer, your pricing, your pitch, your referral language — all of it gets easier once you can describe your business in one clear sentence that the right person immediately recognises as being for them.
My topic: {e.g. HR consulting}
My audience: {e.g. bootstrapped SaaS founders with their first 3-5 hires}
My problem: {e.g. early employee turnover killing startup momentum}
My solution: {e.g. 90-day onboarding system built in one afternoon}
My niche: {e.g. first-time technical founders with zero HR background,
pre-Series A, who just lost their second hire in 60 days}
Return the following in plain English — no jargon:
Niche: one sentence naming exactly who this is for
Problem: one sentence naming the exact painful situation they're in
Solution: one sentence naming what makes your approach different
Immediate benefit: the specific result they get right away
Future benefit: what their business looks like 3 months later
Ultimate benefit: the deeper thing they actually want
One-sentence niche statement: a single clear sentence describing your business —
who you help, what problem you solve, and how you solve it differently.
Specific enough that the right person reads it and immediately says "that's for me."
Write like a human talking to another human.
Specific. Direct. No hype.
Lisa filled everything in and hit run.
The full niche definition came back in seconds.
Here's what changed:
❌ Before: "HR consultant. I help companies build better teams."
✅ After: "Niche: First-time SaaS founders, pre-Series A, who just lost their second hire within 90 days.
Problem: No HR system, no onboarding process — and the next hire is already at risk.
Solution: A 90-day onboarding sprint built in one afternoon — no HR background needed.
One-sentence niche statement: I help first-time SaaS founders stop losing their best early hires — with a 90-day onboarding system any non-HR founder can build in an afternoon."
[Lisa's AI sidekick filled in the remaining sections...]
She read it three times.
That was the business she'd been trying to describe for three months.
It said who. It said what. It said how.
And it made exactly one person stop and think: that's for me. BOOM.
🏆 Lisa's results
Before:
A niche so broad she was cold-emailing everyone and converting no one
Every new project felt like starting from scratch
No referrals, no momentum, no clarity on who she was actually for
After:
A complete niche — specific audience, specific problem, unconventional solution
A one-sentence niche statement to use in her offer, her pitch, and her outreach
First referral came from her second client — who sent someone in the exact same situation
Total time: 15 minutes. Not 3 months.
Her AI sidekick surfaced the problems, found the underserved audience, and built the niche definition. Lisa made the final call on which niche felt right.
Three prompts. 15 minutes.
You go from "I help companies build better teams" to a specific niche definition that makes the right client stop and think: this is exactly what I've been looking for.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'helping you earn more by doing way less' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️