Narrowing Is an Operation, Not an Instinct

Do it once, on one axis, and watch what changes.

"A course for accountants" becomes "a course for accountants who work on acquisitions." One step. Nothing else changed — same knowledge, same person teaching, same price.

But now read both back as a person deciding whether to click. The first describes a category. The second describes somebody's actual job, and the accountant who works on acquisitions recognizes themselves in it in about a second, which is roughly all the attention you get.

That is the entire mechanism, and it is available to you four separate times. Most people perform it once, feel brave, and stop.

Here is the operation, and then the four objections that stop people from running it.

The four axes

Narrowing is not one decision. It is four, and they are independent, which means you can go a long way without ever getting uncomfortably specific on any single one.

Sub-population. Not your profession, a part of it. Not accountants — acquisitions accountants. Not engineers — electrical engineers. Not teachers — secondary school teachers. Not doctors — family practice doctors. Every profession has these divisions already and your people know exactly which one they belong to.

Career stage. The newly qualified. The five-year practitioner going independent. The one moving into supervision. The one changing specialty. Stage determines which problems are live, and a problem that is urgent at year two is invisible at year twelve.

Situation. The circumstances in which the problem shows up. Working alone rather than in a group. In a rural setting rather than a city. Inside a large organization rather than a small one. Under a particular kind of constraint.

Outcome. The specific capability on the far side of the course. Not "understand pricing" but "set a fee schedule they can defend to a client without discounting."

Apply one axis and you have improved the offer. Apply three and you have something a person can recognize themselves in completely.

The stopping rule: narrow until the description names a person you could point at in a room, and then stop. Not a persona, not a segment — somebody you could actually identify.

"But I am shrinking my market"

Yes. That is the trade and it is worth being straight about it: fewer people will be interested.

What increases is the proportion of the interested ones who act. A broad description is read by more people and recognized by none of them, so it converts almost nobody; a narrow one is read by fewer and lands hard with the ones who match.

There is also a second effect that people miss. A narrow description tells you exactly where those people gather, what they read, and what language they use — which makes every subsequent marketing decision easier and cheaper. A broad audience is not just a weaker offer; it is a target you cannot aim at.

"What if I pick the wrong one?"

Then you widen, which is much easier than narrowing.

This is the objection that keeps people broad for years, and it rests on a false model of the decision. Choosing a narrow audience does not remove anyone from your list, prevent anyone from buying, or destroy the material. It changes who your description speaks to most directly, and that is reversible in an afternoon.

What is not reversible is the two years spent being vague, during which nobody in particular ever felt addressed.

Also worth knowing: you can be narrow in the description and wide in who actually turns up. People routinely buy things aimed slightly to one side of them, if the thing is specific enough to seem serious. Nobody buys something aimed at nobody.

"I would be turning away paying customers"

You would not, and this is a straightforward misunderstanding of how buying works.

A narrow page does not have a lock on it. The accountant who does not work on acquisitions can still read it, and if the underlying problem is theirs too, they will still buy — people are perfectly capable of translating.

What the narrow page does is decide who feels spoken to first. That is a positioning choice, not an eligibility rule, and treating it as one is why so many pages end up addressing a category that does not exist.

"My expertise is broader than that"

Almost certainly. And the course is not your expertise — it is one product built from part of it.

This objection is really about identity: narrowing the offer feels like narrowing yourself, and after fifteen years of range that is unpleasant. But the business is not the course. The business accumulates courses, and each one is narrow, and together they eventually describe as much of your expertise as you want.

The order matters, though. Narrow first, then widen through additional products aimed at people who already know you. Start broad and you have nothing specific enough to attract anyone in the first place, which means there is nobody to widen toward.

Run it on what you have

Take your current description and put it through the four axes now.

Which part of the profession. At which stage. In which situation. Toward which outcome.

Then read the result out loud and ask whether it names somebody. If you can picture them — where they work, what went wrong last week, what they typed into a search box at eleven at night — you are finished. If you can only picture a category, you have one more pass to do.