Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Hazel writes a Sunday newsletter about home baking — cookies, cakes, breads.
It started as a way to share her weekend bakes with friends.
Her pitch is simple: home bakers don't need more recipes.
They need one voice they trust.
And her readers? They want exactly that — a guide, not an endless list of recipes.
⛳️ Problem:
Hazel writes weekly issues about "home baking," and growth has gone flat.
One Sunday it's sourdough.
Next it's layer cakes.
Then macarons.
Each issue tries to reach every baker at every skill level.
Four months in, her open rate sits at 17%. New signups have stalled. Ouch.
Her question: which exact reader inside "home baking" should she write for?
🔥 The recipe
➡️ Niche-within-niche
Picture a giant mall with a thousand stores.
You can't be the mall — too big, too crowded.
But you can own one perfect little shop nobody else runs.
That's what Nicolas Cole figured out.
He co-founded Ship 30 for 30, a paid writing course that made millions.
His own writing online has pulled over 100 million views.
His take: most solo entrepreneurs try to serve a giant category.
So they end up serving nobody.
The fix? Descend twice — mega-category, then niche, then niche-within-niche.
You narrow by demographic, industry, location, price, platform, or distribution.
The narrower your corner, the easier the right reader finds you.
And get this — Cole ran it on himself, on Quora.
Quora is a website where anyone can ask a question and anyone can answer.
He didn't write about "writing" in general.
He picked one narrow corner: how to build an audience by writing online.
By 2015 he was the single most-read writer on the whole site.
🚗 The steps
🗺️ Step 1 — Name your mega-category out loud.
Think of the widest aisle in that mall — "food," "fitness," "money."
It's huge, vague, and full of everyone.
Just say yours plain.
Don't dress it up.
Hazel's mega-category is "food."
It covers baking, grilling, pasta, pies, salads — millions of cooks.
Inside that huge category, her baking newsletter barely stands out.
🔽 Step 2 — Pick one specific niche inside it.
Now step into one store, not the whole aisle.
Pick the slice your real life actually lives in.
Hazel drops from "food" to "home baking."
That's the corner she already lives in — she bakes most weekends.
Still too broad, but closer.
🎯 Step 3 — Narrow once more using one of the six dimensions.
Now find the one shelf in that store only you stock.
Pick by demographic, location, platform, price, industry, or distribution.
Hazel narrows by skill level and outcome.
Her micro-niche: foolproof cakes for nervous first-time bakers.
That's a real person — someone staring at a cake that didn't rise.
She's quietly been that person for years.
The prompt below will narrow your mega-category twice using all three steps.
You just tell it the giant category you're starting from.
🧸 Big category + one narrow corner = the one spot only you can fill.
🏄♀️ The prompt
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Update your input values in the prompt or just run as is, your AI sidekick will use the example values and will give output.
CONTEXT:
- (use what's available, fall back to the inline values)
- If my Voice Profile exists, write in that voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If my ICP / Audience doc exists, target that reader. Otherwise, use the audience below.
Inputs:
My mega-category (the giant umbrella I've been writing inside — too broad to charge for, too vague to attract anyone specific):
{e.g. food, fitness, personal finance, marketing, parenting}
What I've actually lived or done inside that category (3-5 short phrases about real experience — not theory, not what I read in a book):
{e.g. years of weekend baking, a rotation of go-to cake recipes, a dozen sunken sponges before I cracked it, a Sunday baking ritual that actually sticks}
For Audience: {e.g. nervous first-time bakers who want a cake that rises every time, without a pastry-school course}
For Outcome: {e.g. a one-page micro-niche pitch I can paste on my newsletter About page and use to rewrite every subject line for the next month}
Outputs:
1. My Mega-Category — one sentence naming the giant umbrella.
2. My Niche — one level down, picking the slice my lived experience already covers.
3. My Niche-Within-Niche — one more level down, using whichever of the six dimensions (demographic / industry / location / price / platform / distribution) fits my real reader best.
4. My one-line reader picture — a single sentence describing the exact human who will read every issue.
5. The dimension I should NOT use — the one I keep wanting to pick because it sounds smart, even though it doesn't match my lived experience.
Then rewrite my current newsletter About paragraph in 3-4 sentences using the micro-niche from output 3.
One giant category narrowed twice.
One reader you can picture without squinting.
One paid corner of the internet only you can fill.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'making entrepreneurship fun again with your AI sidekick and AI coach' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️