How to Niche Down and Grow Your Business w/ Matt Lakajev
with Matt Lakajev
Chris Do and Matt Lakajev explain how a specific niche makes a business easier for the right clients to recognize.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · June 17, 2026
A broad client list can hide a marketing problem
A business can be good enough to earn referrals and still struggle to explain why a stranger should hire it. The work is not necessarily the problem. Matt Lakajev, who coaches business owners and runs the LinkedIn marketing program Six Figure Creators, locates the gap in how a business becomes recognizable outside its existing relationships.
His perspective comes from working with founders and helping them market their services, particularly on LinkedIn. In conversation with Chris Do, he describes a familiar contradiction: the varied client list that proves a business can deliver also makes it difficult to tell prospective clients exactly whom it serves.
A referral arrives carrying someone else's confidence. Before the first meeting, another person has already vouched for the provider. The prospective client still needs to assess compatibility and competence, but the introduction has done some of the persuasive work.
Lakajev calls that remaining assessment a “weirdo test.” The phrase is deliberately blunt. A referred prospect is not necessarily encountering an unknown business with no reason to believe its claims.
Online, that borrowed confidence is missing.
A stranger scrolling past a post does not have the context of a recommendation or the patience of a scheduled conversation. The message has to establish relevance before there is an opportunity to explain the business in detail. A description that accommodates every previous client can fail to address any particular reader.
This is where the resistance to specialization becomes expensive. Creative businesses often hear a narrower positioning statement as a restriction on the work they are allowed to accept. They imagine a smaller opportunity pool before considering whether the larger one currently produces any inquiries.
Lakajev challenges that assumption by asking whether the business has actually won clients through its online marketing. If the answer is no, the supposed audience being sacrificed has not yet become a source of business.
The trade is not necessarily fewer leads for greater clarity. It can be an unfocused message that produces nothing for a focused message that someone finally understands.
Do approaches the same tension through the feeling of being chosen. A prospective client wants evidence that the provider understands their situation, not merely that the provider is available for any paying assignment. Universal interest can read as indifference to the details that make a particular engagement difficult.
That distinction separates delivery capability from public positioning. A business can possess broad skills while choosing to make one application of those skills especially visible. Its marketing does not have to reproduce its entire portfolio.
The aim is not to pretend other capabilities do not exist. It is to stop making an unfamiliar buyer assemble the case for relevance alone. The positioning statement should do work that the referral once did: provide an immediate reason to keep listening.
The offer has to survive contact with the buyer
Before a business chooses a narrower audience, Lakajev puts a more basic issue on the table: whether that audience would buy the offer at all. Precision is not proof of demand. A description can be extraordinarily specific and still identify people who have no interest in purchasing the proposed solution.
His example is personal. He describes his father as a Christian panel beater from Sydney's Northern Beaches and imagines an offer for group therapy directed at someone exactly like him. In Lakajev's account, that offer would fail because his father already turns to church for that kind of support.
The point is not a general claim about religion, occupation, or therapy. It is that demographic accuracy does not establish commercial relevance. A seller can correctly describe the person while misunderstanding what that person considers a solution.
The buyer's existing behavior matters more than the elegance of the audience profile.
Lakajev also describes the problem of selling coaching directly to managers who expect their employers to pay for professional development. A need can be genuine without the person experiencing it being the person prepared to purchase help.
That is a different problem from weak copy. More persuasive language cannot automatically repair a mismatch between the beneficiary and the expected payer. Before promotion comes a practical investigation of how the purchase is supposed to happen.
The distinction sits alongside the editorial premise of You Don't Need a Personal Brand. You Need an Offer. Visibility and a commercially coherent offer are separate concerns. Lakajev's argument begins with the latter because recognition without willingness to buy does not solve the business problem.
He treats these buying conditions as interdependent rather than interchangeable. An attractive outcome cannot compensate for an audience that does not recognize the category. Evidence of interest cannot compensate for a payment arrangement the buyer rejects.
To discover those mismatches, he returns to direct conversation. A post produces limited visible feedback: a reaction, a comment, or silence. A conversation exposes hesitation, confusion, competing priorities, and the language people use when an explanation does not land.
That feedback changes the offer, not merely its presentation.
Several apparently similar problems need to be separated:
- The audience does not understand what kind of service is being sold.
- The audience understands it but does not actively want it.
- The promised result is too vague to evaluate.
- The audience expects someone else to cover the cost.
Treating all four as a marketing problem encourages the seller to publish more of a message that has not earned its premise. Lakajev instead asks the business to learn what buyers already consider legitimate, desirable, and worth paying for. That work precedes the confident positioning statement.
Recognition is more specific than an audience label
Lakajev's definition of niching is not simply making an audience smaller. It is making the right person recognize themselves. The test happens on the buyer's side of the screen, not in the seller's spreadsheet.
An audience label can be narrow in a database and meaningless in everyday life. His example is a mid-market professional: a classification that may help someone organize a market, but does little to evoke a lived identity.
A CrossFitter, a gamer, or a creative has a different quality. These labels can connect to activities, habits, language, and relationships. They offer material for communication because the people described participate in something recognizable.
But a shared activity is only a starting point. Lakajev combines it with location and a particular life stage. A person who has just finished university is not necessarily navigating the same constraints as a new parent, even if both belong to the same professional or recreational community.
That is how a category becomes a situation.
His example of CrossFit dads on Sydney's Northern Beaches makes the distinction concrete. The content is no longer about fitness in the abstract. It can address training after little sleep, avoiding injury, and the frustration of not lifting the weights someone once could.
Those details make a person's circumstances visible. The desired outcome is not merely greater performance. It includes continuing to participate in an activity while living with responsibilities and limitations that have changed.
Language then becomes evidence that the seller understands the situation. Lakajev points to terms CrossFitters use, including WOD and box. Within his example, those words are not decorative jargon. They are signals that the message belongs to a familiar setting.
Do introduces an important distinction: whose language is being used?
A provider can sound sophisticated to colleagues and remain unclear to buyers. Do describes the challenge of titling educational content. An expert's description of sales objections can be less immediately legible than a buyer's desire to get more clients or lose fewer bids.
The lesson is not to eliminate specialized language everywhere. It is to distinguish the customer's vocabulary from the provider's professional shorthand. Familiarity depends on the person receiving the message.
The same audience-centered concern gives context to Know your audience. Here, the demand is especially concrete: the business must identify the words its prospective clients already use, rather than assuming its own terminology communicates value.
Lakajev still leaves room for personal stories. A niche does not require every post to describe the buyer's problem. The provider's experience can make the service more credible or reveal qualities that the audience respects.
But the seller cannot select an audience as if selecting keywords. The public identity has to be sustainable. A performed personality requires continued maintenance; actual experience gives the business something more durable to communicate.
The proof was already in the client list
The strongest practical example begins with a video production business that already had clients. Lakajev describes coaching an operator who worked with a partner, traveled from Newcastle to Sydney, and helped people produce personal-brand videos.
The service was tangible: shoot days, concepts, edited videos, and assets for social platforms. Its challenge was not an inability to explain the production process. It was deciding whose situation that process should address in public.
Referrals had brought in different kinds of clients. That variety made an undifferentiated description feel accurate, but it did not give the business an obvious audience for its own content. Lakajev's response was to examine the work already happening.
The questions were not abstract exercises in imagining an ideal customer. They concerned existing relationships:
- Which clients had been most successful?
- Which clients were enjoyable to work with?
- Where were those clients located?
- What did those clients want to change?
According to Lakajev's account, roughly 70 percent of the business came from people in finance, including mortgage brokers and financial planners in Sydney. That concentration supplied a starting point the broad service description had concealed.
The next distinction concerned readiness. These clients were already posting on Instagram and TikTok. They were not being persuaded that personal-brand content should exist; they wanted to move beyond self-recorded videos toward more professional production.
That transition made the offer easier to place.
The prospective buyer could already recognize the activity, had experience with the platforms, and had reached a stage where production quality mattered. The provider's task became helping a particular group make a particular upgrade, not selling every business on the general merits of video.
This is a useful companion to the broader client-attraction subject of Proven Strategies to Attract Your Ideal Clients. In Lakajev's example, specificity emerges from a pattern in actual work rather than an invented portrait of an attractive market.
The focus also creates editorial material. The business can address the content concerns of finance professionals, the logistics of filming in Sydney, and the practical shift from informal recordings to organized shoot days. It has real assignments from which to draw examples.
Importantly, this remains a coaching example, not a documented revenue result. The transcript establishes a clearer positioning direction. It does not establish what the agency earned after adopting it.
Nor does the new focus require rejecting every other inquiry. Lakajev explicitly separates a public specialty from the decision to accept suitable work outside it. A referred prospect can ask whether the business also handles another kind of assignment.
The answer can still be yes.
That flexibility addresses the fear beneath much resistance to niching. The business is choosing what to become known for, not signing away its ability to judge opportunities individually. Its outward message becomes selective without making its commercial decisions automatic.
Credibility lives in the details nobody advertises
Identity and language can be identified on paper. Cultural understanding is harder to compress into a positioning exercise because some of its most important signals are not formally stated.
Lakajev illustrates the problem with shoes. He describes settings where expensive shoes would be unremarkable, then contrasts them with his experience of casual breakfasts on Sydney's Northern Beaches, where people may arrive barefoot.
The observation is local and personal, not a universal rule about Sydney. Its usefulness lies in the mismatch: a signal intended to communicate success can communicate unfamiliarity when it enters a different setting.
Professional context creates similar problems. Lakajev imagines a lead-generation provider speaking with a financial planner without acknowledging the constraints surrounding approvals and regulated communication. The prospect does not need to deliver a detailed critique for trust to weaken.
Something simply feels wrong.
The business has claimed relevance without demonstrating awareness of an important operating condition. That is different from omitting a fashionable term. It suggests the provider has not considered what working with this client actually entails.
Do pushes on the practical difficulty. If understanding depends on participation, how does someone enter a market where they do not already belong? Telling an outsider to become an insider is not yet a usable answer.
Lakajev's response is honesty combined with usefulness. Someone entering a new niche should acknowledge what is new rather than performing fluency they have not earned. That admission gives the other person an accurate basis for the interaction.
He offers a hypothetical cybersecurity practitioner leaving employment after years in the field. Instead of presenting an inflated business identity, the practitioner can explain the transition, point to relevant experience, and offer a short video identifying issues noticed on a prospective client's website.
The introduction establishes what is known and what is still being built. The useful observation gives the recipient a reason to engage beyond generosity toward a beginner.
This requires tolerating rejection. Lakajev does not offer a message that makes every stranger receptive. His point is that a request grounded in something useful has a different character from an attempt to extract attention or opportunity without contributing anything.
Do reframes the associated free work as an exchange. Experience, a testimonial, or a better understanding of the market can be valuable even when money is not involved.
“So there's a value exchange,” Do says.
That distinction also belongs beside Free Work That Actually Pays. The relevant question is not whether an interaction has an invoice. It is whether the contribution creates meaningful value for both parties.
A newcomer cannot manufacture belonging by copying vocabulary. Participation creates encounters with the inconvenient details: what needs approval, what clients hesitate to publish, and what they assume a competent provider already knows. Those details turn a selected audience into a market the business can credibly serve.
A positioning framework grounded in actual conversations
Lakajev's practical framework has two distinct jobs. First, establish whether the offer belongs in the chosen market. Then establish whether the audience can recognize itself in the way that offer is communicated.
Offer viability comes before audience recognition. Reversing the order produces polished messages for services the intended buyer does not understand, want, or expect to purchase. The framework is most useful as a set of claims to test in conversation, not blanks to fill with confident guesses.
For viability, Lakajev names four conditions:
- A category that they buy. The buyer recognizes the kind of service and considers it a legitimate purchase.
- Latent demand. The intended audience is already looking for the kind of help being offered.
- The outcome that is promised. The buyer understands what changes when the work succeeds.
- Payment normalization. Paying for the solution, including who pays, fits the buyer's expectations.
He describes the relationship as multiplication: if any factor is zero, the equation returns zero. This is his diagnostic model, not a measured law of buyer behavior. Its value is the insistence that a strong element cannot automatically rescue a missing one.
A compelling outcome does not solve the manager's expectation that an employer should pay. A precise audience label does not solve the father's preference for a different source of support. Each condition demands its own evidence.
The recognition side begins with three identity decisions: a subculture, a location, and a life stage. These establish who the message addresses and what is happening in that person's circumstances.
Recognition combines identity, language, and cultural rules. The identity decisions locate the audience. Language and cultural understanding determine whether the business sounds and behaves like a credible participant.
The working sequence is straightforward:
- Name a subculture whose members recognize the label themselves.
- Choose the location that gives the offer a relevant setting.
- Identify the transition or stage that makes the need timely.
- Learn the words people actually use to describe their situation.
- Observe the expectations and constraints that shape how work gets done.
For an established business, past clients provide a starting point. The video producer did not need to invent a market from scratch. Reviewing successful relationships revealed a concentration of clients, a shared location, and a common transition.
For someone starting out, the evidence has to be gathered through contact. Useful conversations and modest contributions create opportunities to learn what a polished audience profile leaves out.
The distinction matters because a framework can create the appearance of certainty faster than experience creates understanding. Lakajev's method depends on returning its answers to real people. If the audience does not recognize the description, the worksheet is not finished simply because every field contains text.
A believable promise beats an extravagant one
The final obstacle is the temptation to make the offer more dramatic than the audience can believe. Lakajev describes sellers promising to double business revenue while halving working time. The apparent value is enormous, but the prospect can reject the claim before considering the proposed mechanism.
The issue is not whether improvement is desirable. It is whether the buyer believes this provider can produce it in this situation.
Lakajev calls his way of examining that decision the trust utility equation: the perceived likelihood of the outcome multiplied by its value, minus the perceived risk. Again, this is his explanatory model. It is not presented as a validated numerical instrument.
The useful implication is that increasing the promised reward does not necessarily increase willingness to act. If the claim destroys belief, the larger reward contributes little. The seller has improved the headline while weakening the case.
A smaller useful interaction can make a more credible advance. It lets the other person observe judgment, relevance, and competence rather than being asked to accept those qualities as assertions.
Lakajev offers his own account of helping Ali Abdaal with LinkedIn and providing coaching to Abdaal's community without charging. He later asked for an introduction to a podcast. In that account, help preceded the request.
The story does not establish a guaranteed return on free advice. It shows how a relationship can contain evidence of usefulness before it contains a proposal. The introduction was a possible result of that exchange, not an entitlement created by it.
The same standard applies to content. A post that explains a specific problem accurately can demonstrate understanding before a sales conversation. A post that makes sweeping promises asks the audience to supply confidence the business has not yet earned.
For the video producer, credible material already exists in the work: the questions finance clients ask, the decisions made before a shoot, and the difference between recording casually and arranging professional production. Those subjects need less inflation because they come from an actual service relationship.
The tactical challenge is therefore concrete. A business relying on referrals can inspect its client history, identify a recurring situation, and test whether prospective buyers recognize it. It can clarify the purchase conditions before multiplying its publishing schedule.
A business entering a new market can stop claiming familiarity and start earning it. Honest introductions, relevant observations, and useful contributions reveal what the audience expects from someone qualified to help.
Neither route requires rejecting every opportunity outside the chosen niche. Both require making a clear choice about the audience the business will understand well enough to address in public.
The constraint is not the number of people a business can serve. It is the number of people who can recognize a credible reason to choose it.
A niche is not a smaller claim to fame. It is a more believable claim to relevance.
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