Niching down is overrated. Here's what I do instead

I think niching down is overrated. Not wrong, just overprescribed. The best marketers and operators I know get their edge from connecting patterns across industries, not from knowing one industry's habits by heart. Niching makes sense in a few specific situations, like regulated verticals or a brand-new business that needs a wedge. Outside those, range wins.

The advice everyone gives

Every agency founder hears it eventually, usually from someone holding a podcast mic. "Pick a niche. Dentists. Only dentists. The riches are in the niches." It's said with the confidence of a law of physics, and honestly, it sounds right. Specialists charge more. Specialists are easier to refer. Specialists get to say "we only work with dentists" on their homepage, which is a very tidy sentence.

I've thought about this a lot, because Cultre doesn't look like that. We work with software companies and with businesses here in Redding, and no two weeks look alike. To a niche purist, that reads like a junk drawer.

Here's my case for the junk drawer.

A garden makes the argument better than I can

I garden, and the garden is the best way I know to explain this. So stay with me.

The niche advice is a monoculture. One crop, planted in tidy rows, optimized for one harvest (the agency that only does dentists). Monocultures are efficient. They're easy to plan, easy to describe and easy to sell. They're also fragile. One pest, one bad season, one shift in the market, and the whole field goes at once.

Now look at the oldest companion-planting system on this continent. Indigenous farmers, including the Haudenosaunee, grew corn, beans and squash together and called them the Three Sisters. The Old Farmer's Almanac lays out the partnership: the corn is a trellis for the beans, the beans fix nitrogen that feeds the soil, and the squash spreads broad leaves that shade the ground, hold moisture and choke out weeds.

None of those plants is a generalist. Each one is very good at its own job. The magic is in what they do for each other, and that's the point people miss when they hear me say niching is overrated. I'm not arguing for being mediocre at everything. I'm arguing that the yield comes from the connections between deep skills, not from a single row planted forever.

What connecting dots actually looks like

Some of the most useful ideas in history came from someone carrying a pattern out of one field and dropping it into another. My favorite small example: in 1941 a Swiss engineer named Georges de Mestral came home from a hunting trip, found burdock burrs stuck to his pants and his dog's coat, and put one under a microscope. Tiny hooks. That observation became Velcro, though, as History.com tells it, it took him close to a decade to turn burrs into a product. A plant, a dog and a textile loom. Not a niche in sight.

Marketing works the same way, just with lower stakes and fewer burrs. Here's the kind of thing I mean:

• What a bait shop teaches SaaS. The best tackle shop doesn't hand you a catalog. It tells you what's biting this week and where. Most software homepages are the catalog. The good ones answer the only question the visitor walked in with: "What works for someone like me, right now?"
• What woodworking teaches websites. Plane against the grain and the board tears out, no matter how sharp the blade. A website works the same way: design against how people already scan and decide, and no amount of clever copy fixes the tear-out.
• What local businesses teach AI search. When Redding owners ask why ChatGPT recommends a directory instead of them, the answer looks a lot like why it recommends a competitor's software. Same mechanism, different zip code. (I wrote the long version in how to get your SaaS recommended by ChatGPT.)

A specialist sees the dentist's problem as a dentist problem. Someone with range sees that it's often a booking-flow problem, a trust problem or a seasonality problem, and has watched three other industries solve it already (the beans feeding the corn).

That's the edge. Not knowing everything. Knowing where else the answer has already grown.

Then why does everyone say to niche?

Because it works for the seller, mostly. A niche is easy to explain, easy to market and easy to package. "We do SEO for orthodontists" fits on a business card. "We connect patterns across industries to find the leak in your pipeline" needs a whole article, which, fair, is what you're reading.

There's also a quieter reason. Niching lets you sell the same playbook over and over. That's efficient for the agency. It's not always great for the client, who is paying for a template that was built for the median dentist, not for their particular practice in their particular town.

Monoculture yields look great on the spreadsheet right up until the season changes (the blight). Ask anyone whose whole agency depends on one ad platform's targeting rules what happens the week those rules change.

When niching down is the right call

I promised honesty, so here it is. Sometimes the single row is exactly right. I use a simple test I call soil, season and seed:

If you land on "niche" for two of the three, plant the single row. It'll grow faster, and there's no shame in that. Plenty of great firms started narrow and widened later, which is just crop rotation with a business plan.

And even then, I'd argue for a deep root, wide canopy approach: go deep in one craft or one audience, but keep feeding it from everything else you read, build and notice. The deep root keeps you standing. The wide canopy is where the light comes in.

What this means if you're hiring help

If you're a founder or a business owner choosing a marketing partner, don't ask "do you only work with companies like mine?" Ask a better question: "Where else have you seen this problem, and what did that teach you?"

A good answer will sound specific, a little surprising and obviously true once you hear it. A weak answer will sound like a template. If you want the full checklist for that decision, I laid it out in fractional CMO vs. agency vs. in-house. And if you're a Redding business wondering whether an agency that also works with software companies can understand your world, this is what that looks like for home services.

So, prove me wrong

I'll say it plainly: for most marketing problems, range beats a niche. The person who has seen the pattern in a garden, a workshop and a software company will spot your leak faster than the person who has only seen it in companies exactly like yours.

Maybe I'm wrong. If you've built something great by staying in one row, I'd honestly love to hear the story, and I'll happily trade notes over a call. You can grab 30 minutes with me here, whether it's to argue or to talk about your pipeline.

Here's to the gardeners who plant more than one thing, the operators who borrow from other fields without asking permission, and everyone who's ever found a good idea stuck to their dog. 🍻