Below is the transcript for show two of The Distilled Brand Happy Hour. In the show, I help founders gain traction in their business by offering up one small microtip or micro lesson.   In this show, we explore why the old adage – the riches are in the niches – might be wrong.

The two parts of a niche continued

This week’s tip is a continuation of the one from last week, where we introduced the concept of the WHO and WHAT as it relates to further expand upon this concept of there are two parts to a niche, and if you’re stuck identifying your audience, it’s probably because you’re focused on the wrong part.   Okay. Then you also have a what, and this is the piece that’s mostly overlooked by a lot of folks, but you’re what is the problem that you solve, but it’s also. How you solve it. So the, what has two pieces? Right? So now a lot of folks want to fixate on who they want to spend their time thinking who should I serve?   Who are the people that I should think about? Who are the, you know, the, like I got to niche down or niche down, right? Because the niches niches are in the region. Wow. I didn’t even say that right. Reverse that the niches are in the riches. Nope. Still messed it up. The riches are in the niches.   So that has been drilled into our brains forever. And we truly believe that if we’re going to be able to serve our audience, we have to be able to drill down and figure out who our audience is. So what we do is we go through this exercise where we make this who smaller. Right.   So we make some choices as we go through here, choices, by the way, as a keyword, but we make some decisions and we ultimately come up to this kind of smaller who, because the truth is if we draw this circle, the who’s circle and the what circle, the exact same size, we’re basically saying we help everybody do everything.   Which means that you essentially aren’t helping anybody do anything. So we drill down until we figure out, okay, who is it that we want? Then what we do once we have a smaller who we can keep our what a little bit bigger, right? Because we have a smaller audience so we can help them solve different problems.   So for example, we might help them with, uh, build a brand, right. We might help them with the websites. We might help them with messaging. We might help them with things like, I don’t know, SEO. We might help them with ads. Right? That’s a lot of stuff, but this is how the beginning, by the way of an, of an agency starts where we serve, we start with the small offering and then we decide that we’re going to add a bunch of services.   So we’re going to add in SEO, we’re going to add a brand. We’re going to do a website. We’re going to do messaging. We’re going to do ads. Why? Because our clients said, Hey, oh, by the way, Can you do this? And instead of saying, you know what, we really can’t, what we did was we said, absolutely yes, we can do it.   And so what happens over time in this, with this particular model, which can work, but you need to be prepared that as you begin to add more and more services, you will most likely begin to add more people to service the clients that you take on because now everybody’s. Something different. And then what happens is this who starts to grow.   And eventually you get to this situation where you have this really big agency where you’re trying to serve a lot of people doing a lot of different things. This is typically the progression that you see a lot of micro business owners go after they start what I want to offer you today as an alternative, instead of shrinking your who, for example, what if you made your, what small.   Meaning, what if you specialized in only solving one problem, just one seat. When you do that, you can actually serve a larger audience. Also, when you do this. Your own messaging, your marketing, everything becomes easier because it starts to become really focused because you’re just solving one problem instead of trying to solve multiple problems.   For example, at the distilled brand, we only two. Where we specialize in, I should say brand messaging. And because we specialize in brand messaging, we know the problems and obstacles and issues that our clients have when it comes to messaging, which is something that we’ll cover in a future happy hour.   So our marketing becomes very easy because we know that we have a finite set of problems that we can talk about, but we can talk about those to a larger audience, because most people struggle with brand messaging. And so they know when they hear me talk about these problems that I’m referring to them so we can serve a larger audience, but here’s the thing that’s great about specializing and solving a narrow problem set is that even while you’re who over here, uh, grows, you can actually start to choose who you want to work with.   You can actually pick and determine who your ideal audience is. And you can serve specialize and serve those folks and those folks only. So if you’re struggling with your niche and you’re trying to figure out who you serve, why don’t you take a step back for a minute and ask yourself instead, what problems do I solve for people?   And then ask who has those problems? And you might find that this particular model will suit you better because everything else, when you, when you narrow in, on your, on your wet, the problem you solve, everything else becomes easier. So that’s, today’s micro lesson. If you’re focused on the who too much, and you just can’t figure out who your audience is, who you serve, take a step back, ask yourself what problems do you solve?   How do you solve them? And then I would also challenge you to say, if you can solve, just because you can solve a lot of problems, it doesn’t mean that you should. So think about the problems you solve and then ask yourself, do I really actually enjoy solving these problems? So for example, if you can do SEO, but you’re not really like SEO, Why do it, someone else out there loves to do SEO, find that person and partner with them.   If you want to make your, what circle bigger so that you can serve a smaller audience. Always remember, you can only be found. You can only become known for the problems you solve, not who you serve. So that’s th that’s going to wrap up this week’s distill brand happy hour. That does not last an hour. If you have any questions or comments, or you’d like to, um, message, you give me a direct messages, feel free right now, here, you can sit DME with your questions and I can bring them up and we can talk about them in a future episode.