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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Hazel writes a Sunday newsletter about home baking — cookies, cakes, breads, the works.
It started as a way to share what she baked each weekend with friends.
To her, home bakers don't need more recipes — they need one voice they trust.
Her readers want exactly that — a guide, not just 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 home baker at every skill level.
Four months in, her open rate sits at 17% and new signups have stalled.
Her question: which exact reader inside "home baking" should she be writing for?
🔥 The recipe
➡️ Niche-within-niche
Nicolas Cole is the co-founder of Ship 30 for 30, an online writing course.
His own writing has pulled over 100 million views online.
He argues most solo entrepreneurs try to serve a giant category.
They end up serving nobody.
The fix is to descend twice — mega-category, then niche, then niche-within-niche.
You figure out the niche-within-niche by narrowing by demographic, industry, location, price, platform, or distribution.
The narrower your corner, the easier it is for the right reader to find you.
Cole did exactly this on Quora.
He didn't write about "writing" — he narrowed to publishing and thought leadership.
By 2015 he was the most-read writer on the whole platform.
🚗 The steps
🗺️ Step 1 — Name your mega-category out loud.
Write the giant umbrella you started inside.
Don't dress it up. Say it plain.
Hazel's mega-category is "food."
It covers baking, grilling, pasta, pies, salads — millions of cooks.
Inside that ocean, her Sunday baking newsletter is one drop.
🔽 Step 2 — Pick one specific niche inside it.
Drop one level. Pick the slice your real cooking actually lives in.
Hazel drops from "food" to "home baking."
That's the corner she already lives in — flour on the counter most weekends.
Still too broad — but closer.
🎯 Step 3 — Narrow once more using one of the six dimensions.
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 she can picture staring at a sunken sponge on a Sunday.
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 only seat at the table.
🏄♀️ 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 🦸♂️