Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Maya’s newsletter about everything
Maya is a project manager at a hospital, and she writes a newsletter on the side.
It’s about leadership, the same broad topic a thousand other newsletters already cover.
She picked it that way on purpose, because a broad topic means more possible readers.
But a stranger searching for help finds a thousand newsletters that all sound the same,
and has no reason to pick hers.
🧩 Her struggle:
She writes for anyone who leads anything, so the readers she’d be perfect for never find her.
In the hospital break room, a coworker tells her the real story of a young writer
who also wrote about a huge topic that thousands of people already covered,
and still became the most-read writer on a site with millions of users.
And he did it by writing about less, not more.
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✍️ The writer who stopped writing about writing
Nicolas Cole was a young writer trying to build an audience online.
He wrote about writing on Quora, the site where people post questions and anybody can answer.
Almost nobody read his answers.
Writing about all of writing was the obvious mistake.
Writing is an enormous subject with an enormous number of people already writing about it.
So he did the opposite of what felt safe and picked a smaller topic 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 200 million users.
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.
He also founded 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.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Niche Within a Niche
Nicolas stopped writing about writing and wrote about one corner of it, and became the most-read writer on Quora.
What he did has a name: a niche within a niche.
A giant topic doesn’t work, because nobody can be the one writer people think of for all of it.
Nicolas’s own way of finding one: cut your broad topic into subtopics.
For example, “relationships” splits into breakups, first dates and long-distance relationships.
Then write about 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.
It isn’t the one you like best.
It’s the one your readers already proved they wanted.
Going smaller isn’t lowering your ambition.
A small corner is the only way the right readers can spot you at all.
So you stop trying to cover your whole topic in your newsletter, and pick the one corner your ideal reader is actually searching for.
An AI can answer the broad topic for anyone.
Your corner is where you’re still the one they come to.
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🛠️ Maya’s turn
So what about Maya and her leadership newsletter, which sounds like a thousand others?
That night, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what people at work actually come to her for.
Her AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Your corner is nurses who just got promoted to lead a team,
because they’re the ones who keep coming to you for help at work.
She rewrites the line at the top of her newsletter that night.
Her next issue is for nurses in their first week of leading their old coworkers.
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🌅 Six months later
Maya’s newsletter is for new team leads in hospitals now, and nobody else.
Nurse managers forward it to the people they just promoted.
Four hundred people read it, and most of them open every issue.
Your topic is probably bigger than it needs to be.
Stop writing about your whole topic, and write about one corner of it.
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 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below takes the broad topic you are writing about and finds the small corner you can own.
🧰 What you’ll need
The topic you write about now, and who you picture reading it
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. leadership, and anyone who leads a team, reallyWhat you’ve lived through most often, and what people come to you for in real life
- e.g. helping nurses who just got promoted run their first team meeting, and how to give feedback to someone who used to be your coworkerHow many people already cover your broad topic
- e.g. thousands, and several of them are very good
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three 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 sent issues, my drafts, or my subscriber numbers, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume people who lead teams at hospitals, from brand-new team leads to department heads.
- 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.
- 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 newsletter covers now, and who I picture reading it:
{e.g. leadership, and anyone who leads a team, really}
The situation I have personally lived through most often, and what people come to me for in real life:
{e.g. helping nurses who just got promoted run their first team meeting, and how to give feedback to someone who used to be your coworker}
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.