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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
Hazel writes a Sunday newsletter about home baking — cookies, cakes, and breads.
She started it as a simple way to share her weekend baking with friends.
She believes home bakers don't need more recipes; they need one voice they trust.
And her readers? They want exactly that — a guide, not another endless list of recipes.
⛳️ Problem:
Every week, Hazel writes about "home baking," but her growth has gone flat.
One Sunday it's sourdough, the next it's layer cakes, then macarons.
Each issue tries to reach every baker, at every skill level, all at once.
Four months in, only 17 out of 100 readers open her emails, and new signups have stalled. Ouch.
Her question:
Which exact reader, inside all of "home baking," should she actually write for?
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Niche Within a Niche
Nicolas Cole is a writer who has sold over $10 million of writing courses.
But years ago, he was just one more person trying to get noticed online.
He started writing on a website called Quora, where people ask and answer questions.
At first he made a common mistake — he wrote about "writing" in general.
That's a huge, crowded topic, and his answers got lost in the crowd.
So he did the opposite of everyone else. He got smaller, on purpose.
He didn't write about writing. He wrote about one narrow corner of it.
His corner was simple: how to build an audience by writing online.
Turns out — because he owned that one small corner, the right readers kept finding him.
By 2015, he was the single most-read writer on the whole website.
Cole calls this trick a niche within a niche.
Don't try to serve a giant topic, because then you serve no one.
Pick your topic, then go smaller, then smaller again, until the corner is truly yours.
🚗 So Hazel tried it her way.
Recall Hazel and her home-baking newsletter?
It was too broad to grow, pulling in every kind of baker at once.
So she decided to shrink her topic down, the way Cole did.
Spoiler: shrinking her topic is what grew her list.
She started with her big, crowded topic: food.
That was far too broad, so she stepped down one level, to home baking.
But that was still too wide — it covers bread, cakes, pies, and everyone who makes them.
So she went smaller one more time, and asked who she could help the most.
Funny thing is — she'd quietly been that person for years.
Someone standing over a cake that came out flat, sure they had ruined it.
That was her reader: nervous, first-time bakers who just want a cake that rises.
So she made her whole newsletter about exactly that — foolproof cakes for nervous beginners.
It wasn't for every baker anymore. It was for one specific person.
And for the first time in months, the right readers started signing up.
Nailed it — one small corner, and they found her.
🧸 A big topic hides you. One small corner is where the right readers finally find you.
The prompt below narrows your giant category down two levels, just like Cole did.
You just tell it the giant category you're starting from.
🏄♀️ 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 it as is. Your AI sidekick will use the example values and give you an 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.
That's it, my fellow outliers!
Yours 'helping you build profitable businesses 12x faster' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️