Niches are overrated – here’s how to make something with mass appeal.

I’m going to keep this one relatively brief.

I see a lot of advice out there celebrating the idea of narrowing down your business to a very specific customer, with a very specific problem. “Riches in the niches” and all that.

I call this “Linear Strategy”, because intuitively it makes sense:

Step 1: Identify customer problem
Step 2: Create innovation

And I see why people do it. If you have a “perfect fit” with a given customer selling to them is easier.

But I also think it’s wrong.

There are many reasons for this, but for now let’s just focus on the simple one: this approach creates small businesses, with limited appeal. If you do something highly specific, your use cases are narrow, and your growth will be constrained to how many of them you can find.

This is not what Coke does.
This is not what IKEA does.
This is not what Salesforce does.
This is not what Shopify does.
This is not what Ford does.

…and it’s also not what the very best SMEs do either, frankly.

All of these businesses solve multiple problems, for multiple types of customer. If you grabbed two random Shopify customers, or IKEA customers, chances are you would find them to be very different.

You might think “oh well that’s just because they’re big mass brands, and most companies aren’t like that”. But I disagree. I think it’s because they have a different fundamental approach to strategy, an alternative to Linear Strategy which I call “Reverse Strategy”.

It’s called reverse because it’s literally the same process backwards:

Step 1: Create innovation.
Step 2: Identify customer problems

You start with an innovation, and then you find customer problems it might solve.

Now note the one key difference here (other than the order): in Reverse Strategy I said customer problems – plural – not customer problem – singular. And this is the key.

When you start with a broad form of innovation you will find that there are many different types of people and types of problem you can apply it to – not just one. You may choose one as your primary for marketing purposes, but you will quickly discover your appeal runs much broader than that.

Silly little example, but for myself I explicitly don’t target fellow strategists with anything I do – and yet they come anyway. They are a secondary customer base for me who are attracted by the same innovation as founders, but driven by a different motivation.

Now you may be wondering: “Sure Alex, that’s fine, but how can you come up with an innovation out of the blue without a targeted purpose like a customer problem?”.

And I’d say there are two ways:

1. Lean into your natural difference. You are already somewhat different from the status quo in your category, in ways that you didn’t fully intend – so what would happen if you leant into this? What would happen if you did it 10x more than you currently are? Push this far enough and this will generate natural innovation and difference for you, which you can apply to customer problems.
2. Fix industry problems, not customer problems. Here you take a 10,000ft view of your industry, and ask what is wrong with it, or what’s missing from it? What is something clear and coherent that could be offered that might provide an alternative? Essentially you just say, “everything in this industry is like X, but what if it was like Y?”…and then explore the implications.

You don’t need a moaning customer to find opportunities. You can just make them up!

This then is how you create “big ideas”, not just trivial incremental ideas which tinker around the edges, like most businesses have.

Forget the ideal customer. Start thinking about the ideal customers.