Niching Down: Why Most Creatives Stay Broke

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Specialisation feels like closing doors. In practice it is the only way most small businesses get found at all.

Ask a freelancer who they work with and you will often get a version of the same answer: anyone who pays. Small businesses, big brands, startups, non-profits, a bit of everything. It sounds open-minded. It sounds like the sensible way to keep the pipeline full.

It is also, more often than not, the reason the pipeline stays empty.

That tension sits at the centre of a live coaching session from Chris Do on The Futur, titled “Why 97% of Creatives Stay Broke”. The argument is uncomfortable in a useful way: narrowing who you serve feels like turning away money, and that feeling is exactly why so few people do it — and why it still works.

Why picking a niche feels like a trap

The logic that keeps people broad is not stupid. If you say you only work with dental practices, you have just declined every restaurant, law firm and SaaS company on the planet. Written down like that, specialisation looks like voluntary poverty.

But breadth has a cost that is much harder to see, because it never arrives as a rejection email. It arrives as silence. When your message has to cover everyone, it says nothing specific to anyone. The session makes the point plainly at around the three-and-a-half minute mark: serving everyone means serving no one.

Think about it from the buyer’s side. Someone running a dental practice, sitting with a problem they cannot solve, is scanning for the person who obviously handles their situation. “Designer, available for projects” does not read as an answer. “I rebuild booking flows for dental practices” does. Same skills, wildly different level of recognition.

Breadth never rejects you outright. It just quietly makes you invisible, and invisibility looks a lot like bad luck.

Specialists get paid for the same hour

Every market prices specialists above generalists, and nobody finds that strange anywhere except in their own business. A general practitioner and a cardiac surgeon both went to medical school. The surgeon charges more because the problem is narrower, the stakes are clearer and the alternatives are fewer.

The same mechanic applies to service businesses. Once you have solved the same problem eleven times, the twelfth client is not buying your hours. They are buying the eleven you already did. You move faster, guess less and can talk about their situation before they have finished explaining it — which is usually the moment the sale is decided.

And here is the part that reframes the whole fear: narrowing does not shrink your potential, it makes your offer legible. The right people finally understand what you do. It is the same instinct you see in founders sharpening their story for admissions committees and investors, which is a large part of what makes a strong Stanford GSB application work — a specific, believable claim beats an impressive but blurry one.

Hard is a feature, not a bug

One of the sharper turns in the conversation comes around the ten-minute mark: easy businesses attract more competition. If a market is simple to enter, everyone enters it, and price becomes the only thing left to compete on.

Difficult markets work the other way. High technical demands, brutal regulatory requirements, long sales cycles, unglamorous subject matter — each of these thins the field. The difficulty that makes a niche unattractive is precisely what protects the people willing to sit in it.

So the useful question is not “where is the easiest work?” but “what am I willing to be patient about that most people are not?” That is a very different filter, and it usually points somewhere less crowded.

The dip, and the people who quit inside it

Anyone who has committed to a niche knows the stretch that follows. You have narrowed your message, you have said no to work you could have taken, and nothing has visibly improved. Referrals have dried up because your old network no longer knows how to describe you. This is the stage the session calls the dip — the painful gap between committing and it working.

Most people quit here. Not because the strategy failed, but because they run out of patience before the evidence arrives. The session pairs this with the old “three feet from gold” story: the miner who stops digging just short of the seam.

The honest caveat is that a dip and a dead end look identical from the inside. Nobody can promise the seam is there. What you can do is decide in advance what evidence would tell you it is working — inbound enquiries mentioning your specialism, better-fit conversations, less price haggling — and give yourself a real window to collect it. Weeks are not enough. Two conversations are not a data set.

A dip and a dead end feel exactly the same from the inside. Decide in advance what proof would tell you which one you’re in.

How to actually choose: constraints beat brainstorming

The reason most people never pick a niche is that they treat it as an open-ended search for the perfect answer. Infinite options, permanent decision, no way to be sure. Of course that stalls.

Constraints break the deadlock, and the session frames defining your ideal client profile — your ICP, the specific type of customer you build the business around — as the practical version of this. Rather than asking who you could serve, narrow with filters:

• Who have you already served well? Look at your past work for the clients where the results were strongest and the process was easiest. That is evidence, not speculation.
• Where does your unfair advantage sit? A previous career, an industry you understand from the inside, a technical skill your peers avoid.
• Who can actually pay? A niche you love that cannot afford you is a hobby with extra steps.
• Who do you want to spend years around? You will be reading their trade press and sitting in their meetings. That matters more than people admit.
• Is it reachable? A good niche has places you can find it — associations, conferences, publications, active online communities.

Run those filters and the infinite list becomes two or three real candidates. That is a decision you can make this week rather than a question you keep reopening.

The reason people avoid it, said out loud

Near the end, the session names the real obstacle: it is rarely analytical. Choosing a niche means committing publicly, which means being visibly wrong if it fails. Staying broad keeps every exit open and lets you tell yourself the plan is still forming.

Being unfindable is not actually safer than being wrong. It just fails more slowly, and it never gives you a clean answer about what went wrong.

It also helps to remember that this is a reversible decision. A niche is a bet with a review date, not a tattoo. Plenty of strong businesses got there by picking a direction, running it properly, learning what the market actually wanted, and adjusting — the pivot that founders talk about so casually is exactly this, and it only becomes possible once you have committed enough to learn something.

What to take from this

The whole argument compresses into one idea: niching down is not about limiting your potential, it is about making yourself easy to recognise. Your message, your offer and your business become simple for the right people to understand — and simple to remember when they are asked for a recommendation.

Three things worth doing this week:

1. Audit your last ten projects. Where were the results best, the friction lowest and the margins healthiest? A niche is usually hiding in work you have already done.
2. Write one sentence. “I help [specific people] with [specific problem].” If you cannot fill both brackets without hedging, you are still too broad.
3. Set a review date. Give the bet six to twelve months, define what evidence counts, and stop renegotiating with yourself in between.

If you want more perspectives like this, the debate about positioning and specialisation runs across a lot of good business media — it is a recurring theme among the strongest sales and marketing channels on YouTube, and it shows up from a different angle in startup and entrepreneurship channels, where the same lesson arrives dressed up as market focus. It is also worth watching how leadership and growth commentators treat the same question at company scale, because the logic does not change when the business gets bigger — only the stakes do.

The market will not reward you for being available to everyone. It rewards being the obvious answer to someone.

Sources

• Why 97% of Creatives Stay Broke… — The Futur (Chris Do) — Live business coaching session on niching down, specialisation, the dip and defining an ICP. Timestamps referenced: 03:24 serving everyone means serving no one, 05:56 the dip, 10:13 easy businesses attract competition, 13:30 defining your ICP, 15:21 constraints create clarity, 17:00 why people avoid niching down.