Your Niche Is Too Wide. Cut It Until It Hurts.
Pick any pitch deck from any accelerator. Flip to slide 4. There it is: "Our customer is small and mid-sized businesses." Or "developers." Or "growth marketers." Or "operators at fast-moving startups."
That's not a niche. That's a population.
And the founders pitching those slides are about to spend six months learning the hard way that "everyone" is the most expensive customer segment in the world.
The fake niche problem
When you say "we sell to SMBs," what you've actually said is: we have no idea who's going to write the check.
A 40-person dental practice in Phoenix has nothing in common with a 12-person creative agency in Berlin, even though both technically count as SMBs. Their problems are different. Their buying processes are different. Their software stacks are different. Their willingness to pay is different. The only thing that unites them is a row in some VC's TAM spreadsheet.
The same trick happens with "developers." Which developers? Mobile devs at consumer apps? Backend engineers at fintech series A's? Solo indie hackers shipping side projects on weekends? These are three completely different markets that happen to share a job title.
A real niche has three things: a name, a place, and a wound. You can list specific companies. You know which Slack channels they hang out in. And you can describe the exact moment in their week when they hit the problem you solve.
If your "niche" doesn't have all three, it's just demographics in a trenchcoat.
Why broader feels safer (but isn't)
Founders default to broad markets because broad sounds bigger. Bigger sounds safer. A "$50B market opportunity" feels like a sturdier place to land than "200 plumbing supply distributors in the Pacific Northwest."
But at $0 ARR, market size is a fantasy variable. You don't need a $50B market — you need ten paying customers. And ten paying customers come from one specific group of people you can actually reach, not from a Gartner report.
This connects directly to something we've argued before about distribution: the hardest part of starting a startup in 2026 isn't building the product, it's getting it in front of the right people. A broad niche makes that impossible. You can't write a single Twitter post, podcast pitch, or cold email that resonates with "all SMBs." You can write one that punches every dental practice owner in the gut.
Narrow markets feel small from the outside. From the inside, they feel like fish in a barrel.
The 20 named customers test
Here's a quick diagnostic. Stop reading and try to write down 20 specific customers you'd sell to in your first six months. Real names. Real companies. Real LinkedIn profiles.
Not "marketing managers." Not "founders." Not "anyone who uses spreadsheets."
Twenty people you could DM by next Tuesday.
If you can't get to 20, your niche is too wide — you've been thinking about job titles instead of humans. If you can get to 200 without effort, your niche is still too wide — you haven't actually filtered.
The sweet spot is when 20 feels achievable but a stretch. When you can name half of them off the top of your head but have to dig to find the rest. That's a niche tight enough to validate against, and exactly the kind of group where the right interview questions start producing actual signal instead of polite agreement.
This is also why ICP breadth is one of the most underrated untested assumptions a founder carries. You assume your market is "marketers." You're never wrong about that — it's too vague to be wrong. But it's also too vague to be useful.
The wedge always expands later
The pushback we hear most often: "But if we niche down too hard, won't we cap ourselves at a tiny market?"
No. Because every category-defining company started with an embarrassingly narrow wedge.
Stripe started with developers who hated existing payments APIs — not "all online merchants." Figma went after a sliver of UI designers who needed real-time collaboration — not "all designers." Superhuman targeted founders and execs who lived in email all day — not "people who send emails." Patreon launched for YouTube musicians, full stop.
In each case, the niche looked too small to build a real company. In each case, that narrow base became the platform from which everything else expanded. The wedge is not the company. The wedge is how you earn the right to become a company.
If you go broad on day one, you skip the part where you learn anything specific. And specific is the only thing that compounds. A reputation for being the go-to tool for one identifiable group is worth more than mediocre recognition across five. The first creates referrals. The second creates churn.
The bottom line
Your job at the start isn't to identify the largest possible market. It's to identify the smallest viable wedge where you can win obviously. Cut your niche until it hurts. Cut it until your friends say "isn't that too narrow?" Cut it until you can name your first 20 customers without opening a spreadsheet.
Then go talk to those 20 people. That's where actual validation starts.
This is one of the first things SaaSsAh is built to fix. Our discovery phase forces a real ICP — not a job title, not a TAM segment, but a specific persona attached to specific channels and a specific wound. The point isn't to make your market smaller. It's to make your first ten customers findable. If you want to stop guessing at "who," that's the entire reason we exist.
