Niches Are Larger Than You Think
The Story
CJ Gustafson thought he was writing for 130,000 CFOs total. At 66,000 subscribers, that math implied he was already halfway to saturating his market. The actual numbers told a different story.
His Niche Pursuits interview broke down who’s actually subscribed: “25% are CFOs or work in finance roles, 20% are entrepreneurs and business leaders looking for better ways to allocate resources and track metrics. The rest are investors and business enthusiasts who enjoy learning how companies make money” (Source 2).
His own framing on the Growth In Reverse podcast: “CJ initially thought he was writing for a finite audience of about 130,000 CFOs… But that wasn’t the case at all” (Source 1). The actual breakdown he discovered via audience polls: “Only about 30% of his newsletter readers were actually CFOs. The other 70% included aspiring CFOs, CEOs (15% of his audience), investors, and other business professionals who wanted to understand finance better” (Source 1).
The mechanism he attributes the spillover to: “Everybody wants to be a part of a club. Everybody wants to be in the know… And if you’re talking about something that is like really engaging to the core people, they’re like, ‘Wow, I want to have that energy, too. I want to learn about that and feel smart,’ then I think other people get pulled into the fold” (Source 1).
The decision he made in response was the non-obvious one: he kept positioning the content toward CFOs anyway, instead of broadening to chase the larger adjacent audience. “By speaking the language of CFOs authentically, CJ attracted anyone who wanted to think more strategically about business operations and metrics” (Source 1). His own logic: “At the end of the day, like I’m talking about running a better business. Yes, it’s written primarily from the perspective of a CFO. But a lot of people out there, regardless of their role, want to be successful in like making their company grow, making their company profitable” (Source 1).
The Niche Pursuits version captures the same conclusion: “He questioned whether his target audience was too narrow, but he realized that CFOs control company budgets and make critical financial decisions — making them a highly valuable group for advertisers” (Source 2).
Lesson for Creators
When you’re building for a small, high-value audience, the temptation is to broaden the writing once you discover that adjacent audiences are reading too. Don’t. The adjacent audiences are reading because the content is built for someone specific — they want the energy and the in-group feel of being one row over from the bullseye. Broadening to “everyone interested in business” would lose the bullseye and the adjacency at the same time. CJ’s niche isn’t a quarter as big as he thought. It’s three or four times bigger, because the core audience has its own concentric rings of professionals who want to think like them.
Related
- Niche Within a Niche - The Wet-Dog-Food Agency — Nathan May: hyper-specific positioning wins B2B services
- The Four Sharing Archetypes - Write for the Forward — the audience map that makes this work in practice
- The N of One - 80th Percentile in Three Things — the positioning structure under it
- How to define your niche: deductive approach — methodological cousin
- How to define your niche: inductive approach — methodological cousin
- ESPN of Pickleball - From Newsletter to Multi-Sport Media Holdco — Thomas Shields: ring-expansion pattern from a tight niche