Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♂️ Ethan’s niche that got boring
Ethan is a product manager at a software company.
On the side, he writes a newsletter.
He picked one topic as his niche: product roadmaps, the plans that say what a team builds next.
Everyone told him the narrower the topic, the better the niche.
Four months in, he’s bored of roadmaps.
He also sounds like every other roadmap newsletter out there.
Meanwhile, new product managers at work keep stopping by his desk with questions.
They ask how to say no to a boss, or how to run a first launch.
He enjoys answering them, but he has never written about them.
🧩 His struggle:
He picked a topic to write about, not a group of people to write for, so he got bored and sounds like everyone else.
On a drive to see his parents, a podcast he likes tells the true story of another product manager,
who said he didn’t care about product management “that much,”
and still built a newsletter that more than a million people read.
That newsletter started with one blog post about his old job.
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📬 The product manager who answered three questions a week
Lenny Rachitsky spent seven years at Airbnb.
He joined in 2012, when Airbnb bought the small startup he was running,
and he started there as an engineer.
Then he became one of Airbnb’s first product managers,
the people who decide what an app should do next.
By the end, he was leading the team that brought new travelers to Airbnb.
In 2019 he left Airbnb to work out what to do next.
He had four plans.
Plan A was to start another company.
Plan B was to help other companies as a paid adviser, full time.
Plan C was to join a startup, and Plan D was to go back to being a product manager at a big company.
Writing wasn’t on the list.
To choose between the four, he gave himself a simple test.
After every meeting, he asked one question: did that give me more energy, or less?
The meetings about the four plans didn’t give him much.
The writing did.
In his words, “I kept finding myself pulled to writing things that people found useful.”
So in June 2019, a few months after he left, he wrote up what seven years at Airbnb had taught him.
He put it on Medium, a big blogging site,
and it ended up among the few hundred most-read posts on the whole site.
That told him people wanted what he knew, so he started a newsletter.
He didn’t write it for everyone who works in tech.
He wrote it for the people he’d worked next to for seven years:
product managers, growth people who work on getting more people to use an app, and managers of teams.
He asked them to send in their questions about work,
and every week he answered three of them, like an advice column in a newspaper.
The people were narrow, but the topics were not.
He later said he didn’t care about product management “that much.”
So he kept writing for the same people,
and let the topics go wherever his curiosity went: building products, growing them, careers, startups.
He also didn’t sit and wait for those people to find him.
He went where they already were.
His first five hundred readers came from one post on Twitter, where a lot of tech people already spent their day.
His next thousand came from two guest posts, articles he wrote for other people’s sites:
one on First Round Review, a site startup founders read,
and one on the blog of Andrew Chen, a well-known writer on growth.
Ten months after he started, he added a paid version for fifteen dollars a month, and about five hundred readers signed up for it.
By 2024, the newsletter and his podcast were bringing in more than a million dollars a year.
Today more than a million people get Lenny’s newsletter.
He wrote for one group of people he’d worked beside for seven years, and wrote about whatever they asked him, so he’d never get bored.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ Narrow People, Wide Topics
Lenny wrote for the people he’d worked beside at Airbnb, and more than a million readers came.
This move is called Narrow People, Wide Topics.
It’s a way to pick your niche: one group of people, with one problem, that you’d be happy to help for years.
For Lenny, the group was product managers, growth people, and managers of teams at tech companies.
What they needed was answers to their questions about work, so he answered three every week.
The people stayed narrow.
The topics went wide: building products, growing them, careers, and startups.
Lenny didn’t pick one topic and stick to it.
He picked one group of people, and wrote about whatever they asked him.
Most of us hear that the narrower the topic, the better the niche.
So we narrow our niche by its topic, and we’re often bored of it within a few months.
Most of us give up right there.
Narrow the people instead, and you’ll still want to write for them years from now.
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🛠️ Ethan’s turn
Back to Ethan and his newsletter on product roadmaps, the topic he got bored of four months in.
That evening, he runs the prompt at the bottom of this email,
and tells it he’s bored of roadmaps,
but never bored of the questions new product managers bring to his desk.
His AI sidekick says:
Write for first-time product managers, like the ones who stop by your desk, and each week answer one question they’re stuck on, whatever the topic.
That weekend, Ethan sends his readers one question: what are you stuck on at work right now?
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🌅 Four months later
Ethan still writes every week, and he hasn’t run out of things to say.
His readers send him about ten questions a week, and he answers one of them in each issue.
So far he’s written about saying no to a boss, running a first launch, and switching teams.
One week, he wrote about roadmaps again, and he enjoyed it.
About two hundred people read his newsletter now.
Your niche doesn’t have to be one narrow topic.
It can be one group of people, and whatever they keep asking you.
Pick one group of people, and write about whatever they ask you.
That’s it, my fellow mavericks!
Yours ‘bringing you cheat codes for 25x faster business success’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
Give your AI sidekick what you do and who already asks you for help, and let it find your niche.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you do, and the part you love
- One or two lines. Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. I’m a product manager at a software company. The part I love is helping someone new work out what to do next.Who already asks you for help
- A minute’s worth, messy is fine.
- e.g. New product managers at work ask me how to say no to their boss, how to run their first launch, and whether to switch teams.
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use. The best is one that can already see your notes, wherever you keep them (on your computer, on the web, or in the cloud).
Swap the two examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT
- Use my own material first. If you can see my notes, my LinkedIn profile, or my résumé, wherever they are stored, read them there. If I uploaded a file, read that. Only then use the examples below.
- Write in plain, friendly words, like a friend who knows my work.
- I'm a mid-career knowledge worker building a newsletter or another content business while I still hold a job.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written. If I dictated an input, it will be messy; that is fine, do not ask me to clean it up.
- The one rule for this build: narrow the people, not the topics. The group must be specific enough that you can name where they spend their day. The topics must be wide enough that I'd still happily write for them for years. Reject any niche that is only a topic, like "product roadmaps" or "productivity."
INPUTS
1. What I do, and the part I love (one or two lines):
{e.g. I'm a product manager at a software company. The part I love is helping someone new work out what to do next.}
2. Who already comes to me with questions, and what they ask (typed or spoken, a minute's worth):
{e.g. New product managers at work ask me how to say no to their boss, how to run their first launch, and whether to switch teams.}
END OF INPUTS
OUTPUT
1. From inputs 1 and 2, list three possible groups of people I could write for. Describe each one so a stranger could picture them at work. Under each, write the problem they keep asking about, using only what input 2 says they ask. Do not invent quotes.
2. For each group, one line: based on input 1, would I still want to answer their questions years from now? Say yes or no, and why.
3. Ask me one question to help me pick between them, and wait for my answer.
4. For the group I pick, name three specific places where they already gather: a named newsletter, subreddit, online community, podcast, or account they follow. Name the exact place, never a whole platform like "Reddit" or "LinkedIn." Only name places you are confident exist. If you are unsure one exists, say so and tell me how to check. Under each, write one sentence on what people there talk about.
5. Finish with my niche on its own, in this exact shape:
"My readers are [one group of people], and the problem they keep asking about is [one problem]."
Then list the three places, one per line.