A man at a gas station once tried to sell me a watch, a phone case, and a bottle of cologne in the time it took me to fill my tank. He had cast a wide net. He was selling to everyone who pulled up to a pump, which is to say he was selling to no one in particular, which is to say he sold nothing.
He believed, as most people do, that the way to sell more is to appeal to more people. Widen the audience. Soften the message so it offends no one. It feels like common sense. More people equals more sales. And it is almost perfectly wrong.
The instinct to reach everyone is the instinct that guarantees you reach no one, because a message built for everyone is a message shaped by fear, and fear sands off every edge that would have made it land. You stop saying the specific thing that would thrill the right person, because it might bother the wrong person. So you say the safe thing that bothers nobody and moves nobody.
The counterintuitive truth, and I have watched it prove out for decades, is that you grow by going smaller first. You pick the smallest group of people whose problem you can solve better than anyone alive, and you build the whole offering, the whole message, the whole experience for them specifically. You let it be too specific, on purpose, because specific is what gets felt.
A message for everyone is a message for no one. A message for someone, specifically, is the only kind that travels.
When a person encounters a message clearly built for someone exactly like him, he does not think this excludes most people. He thinks this is for me. That feeling is worth more than a thousand impressions on people who feel nothing. It is the feeling that converts, that gets shared, that turns a customer into an advocate.
Here is the hard version. Choosing your smallest viable market means choosing who you are not for. It means being willing to watch someone walk away and saying, sincerely, good, you were not who this was built for. The willingness to say not you is exactly what makes the you feel chosen, and people pay, and stay, and talk, for the feeling of being chosen.
Look at the brands you would defend at a dinner party. Every one started narrow. The breadth came later, as a result of the depth, never as a substitute for it. They earned the right to widen by first being indispensable to a few.
Pick your few. Serve them like they are the only people who matter. The many will come, but only because the few told them to.