Someone asked me recently what niche they should focus on. They had a list. They had heard the advice before, many times. Pick an industry, get known in it, build your credibility there, let the referrals do the rest. I had heard the same advice myself, years earlier, when I was trying to figure out how to position my UX agency. So I tried it. I picked a sector. I spoke the language, turned up to the events, targeted the right companies.

It worked. Sort of. But looking back, what actually drove things forward was not the sector. It was a specific problem I kept solving for people in that sector. The industry was just where I first found them.

The niche idea is not wrong. It's just incomplete.

When people talk about picking a niche, they usually mean picking an industry. Healthcare. Retail. Professional services. The logic is sound: familiarity builds credibility, credibility builds trust, trust gets you in rooms. But the industry is not the reason someone hires you. It is not the reason they pay what you charge or refer you to someone else.

They hire you because they have a problem they cannot solve themselves and they believe you can fix it. The industry just tells you where to look for those people. If the problem is big enough and painful enough, the industry matters a lot less than you think.

Try asking a different question

Instead of asking which industry you should focus on, try asking this:

What is the one problem I see again and again, that genuinely hurts the people who have it, and that I know how to solve?

That is your niche. Not a sector. A problem. When you can answer that clearly, a few things get easier. You know what to write about. You know what conversations to seek out. You know how to describe what you do in a way that makes someone feel immediately understood, not just categorised.

Pick the problem. The industry follows.

Industry focus can take you somewhere. Problem focus takes you somewhere specific. The founders who are clearest about what they do tend not to be the ones who picked the right sector. They are the ones who picked the right problem, got genuinely good at solving it, and kept showing up until the right people found them.

What is the one problem you are actually best at solving right now?

If you can name it in a single sentence, you probably already know what your real niche is.