Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
🎒 The guidebook about one bus route
Tony and Maureen Wheeler were a young couple who'd just backpacked from London to Australia.
They stapled together ninety-four pages about the trip and gave it a pale blue cardboard cover.
The trip was London to Australia, over land, and the year was 1973.
It wasn't a guide to travel.
It wasn't even a guide to Asia.
It was a guide to one route, done cheaply, by two people who'd just done it.
That's about as narrow as a travel book can get.
Anybody planning a different trip had no use for it at all.
That's exactly why it sold.
The book was called Across Asia on the Cheap, and the company they started to publish it was Lonely Planet.
BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the British broadcaster, later bought that company in two stages.
It paid $143 million for most of it in 2007, and $68.2 million for the rest in 2011.
Turns out the narrowest possible travel book grew into one of the largest travel publishers in the world.
⛳️ The problem
The Wheelers wrote for people doing one specific trip, so anyone planning that route had nowhere else to look.
Back at our desk, our podcast is about the whole field, the same broad topic a thousand other shows already cover.
We picked it that way on purpose, because a broad topic means more possible listeners.
But a stranger searching for help finds a thousand shows that all sound the same, and has no reason to pick ours.
So the listeners we would be perfect for never find us, and the ones who stumble in do not stay.
The Wheelers went the other way, one bus route, and it grew into one of the biggest travel publishers on earth.
There is a way of picking one small corner of your topic that makes you the only show for the people who need it.
A young writer whose posts went nowhere picked his corner and became the most-read writer on a site with millions of users, so meet Nicolas.
✍️ The writer who stopped writing about writing
Nicolas Cole, a young writer trying to build an audience online, wrote about writing on Quora, and his answers went nowhere.
Quora is the site where people post questions and anybody can answer.
That was the obvious mistake.
Writing is an enormous subject with an enormous number of people already in it.
So he did the opposite of what felt safe and got smaller on purpose.
He stopped writing about writing and wrote about one corner of it — how to build an audience by writing online.
Get this — Quora had roughly eighty million people visiting every month.
Cole says that by 2015, he was the single most-read writer on the whole site.
He has since co-founded Ship 30 for 30, a writing program, and a ghostwriting agency called Digital Press.
His work has been republished in TIME, Forbes and Harvard Business Review.
None of that started with a bigger topic.
It started with a smaller one.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Niche Within a Niche
The Wheelers wrote about one overland route, not about travel, and it sold.
Nicolas stopped writing about writing and wrote about one corner of it, and became the most-read writer on the site.
What they both did has a name: a niche within a niche.
A giant topic serves nobody, because you can't be the person for it.
Nicolas's own way of finding one: cut your broad topic into subtopics.
"Relationships" splits into breakups, first dates, long-distance.
Then write into two or three of those subtopics for a few weeks, and watch which one people actually respond to.
That's your niche within a niche.
Not the one you like best, the one your readers already proved they wanted.
Going smaller isn't lowering your ambition.
It's the only way the right readers can spot you at all.
So you stop trying to cover your whole topic in your podcast, and pick the one corner your ideal listener is actually searching for.
Write the guide to one route.
That's it, my fellow anti-status-quo-ers!
Yours 'helping you skip years of pain and frustration in your life and business' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below takes the broad topic you are writing about and finds the small corner you can own.
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use your own files if it can see them, and the example values if it cannot.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my episode list, my show notes, or my download numbers, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- 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 assume project managers in agencies, three to ten years in.
- Anything I leave as an example, treat as real. Anything I delete, fill in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption.
- Every corner you propose must be one I can already write ten pieces about from experience. Do not propose anything I would have to go and research first.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
The topic my show covers now, and who I picture listening:
{e.g. project management, and project managers broadly, anyone really}
The situation I have personally lived through most often, and what people come to me for in real life:
{e.g. taking over a project that is six months late and politically radioactive, and how to tell a client the date is moving}
How many people are already covering my broad topic:
{e.g. thousands, and several of them are very good}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The corner — one narrow slice of my topic I could plausibly own, stated as the exact reader and the exact situation.
2. Why that one — what I have lived through that makes it mine rather than anybody's.
3. Who I lose — the readers this excludes, named honestly, so I go in with my eyes open.
4. Ten pieces — ten specific things I could write inside that corner without any new research.
5. The one-line description — how I would describe what I write, in a sentence a stranger could repeat.
Then tell me the piece to publish first, and why that one opens the corner best.