☀️ [30DC] Day 6 » Spotting your blockers (and a pass)

Apparently when you niche down your sleep improves, your kids start respecting you, and your plants stop dying.

Picking a niche is huge, and I don’t disagree with the advice to do it – but “find your niche” is like telling a parent “your toddler only needs 3-5 serves of veggies a day”.

Ok wonderful… howww!?

Smart advice that was hard to follow

I can’t tell you how many times I literally sat down to “pick a niche”, spent hours or weeks on it, landed on a dumb idea, and just ended up back at step 1.

Not by staring at a blank page, but actually following the advice of some really smart people – eg:

• Group together similar clients, and go find more
• Draw a venn diagram and find the intersection of what you’re good at, what you love, and what makes money
• Research the market and evaluate demand

All really good advice. All really f*ckin hard, particularly for a team of 1.

And the hardest part – this was often the first step in a series of steps. Step 1: Find you Niche.

You might have been here… it’s an enormous first step that can really trip you up before you’ve even started.

A simpler way that kinda worked for me

TL;DR: 👉 Help someone.

Working on a regular project, with a regular client, in the regular way I would work with any client in that situation, I realised that by helping this one person:

1. who I enjoyed working with;
2. who I was actually helping, in a real way;
3. and they were paying me to do it

meant I was standing on the bottom step of a staircase that could lead to what experts might call “a niche”.

Not everyone has all 3 of those points ticked – your clients might not tick all of them.

Point 1 (you enjoy working with them) is critical.

Point 2 (you’re actually helping them) is obviously critical, but may need testing when you’re just staring.

Point 3 (they pay you) is what you might sacrifice in your first trials, while you figure out how to nail Point 2.

The shortcut

Don’t try to define an entire market from the start; Pick one offer and help one person.

The Shiny Object you’re working on might already have a well defined market that you can point to, so the “one person” has already been defined – maybe you can skip this step (or use it to tighten your offer).

Otherwise, that’s cool – ignore the niche for now.

Just focus on one offer for one person (remember Nedward?).

(Now for the pass)

Yesterday was Day 5 of the challenge but you didn’t receive an email.

With my regular daily emails, I’d stopped sending them on weekends a long time ago, and yesterday being Sunday reminded me why. I’m just not in work mode on the weekend, even though yesterday’s email was only slated to just be a quick “story” rather than an “action” email (this challenge has a mix of both).

So rather than send an extra one today to make up for it, let’s embrace the zero hustle concept and let that one slide. You didn’t miss me, we’re good.

I’m still aiming for daily emails – but being ok with the occasional miss, even inside of a short 30 day window. Anything that does get sent on the weekend during this challenge will be a story that simply helps strengthen a concept rather than create another task for you.

Catcha tomorrow ✌️