Keeping it broad feels safe. It isn't.

"We don't want to alienate anyone. Let's keep it broad."

It's one of the most common pieces of advice in early-stage marketing, and founders usually give it to themselves. It sounds sensible.

It's usually fear.

Why the advice sounds right

Narrowing your positioning means saying, out loud, who your product isn't for. When every customer counts, that feels like giving money away. Broad feels like more reach.

Why it's wrong

A message written for everyone has to avoid anything specific. No industry, no role, no particular problem. So it describes the product in terms that could fit anyone, and no one recognises themselves in it.

Broad doesn't mean more people hear you. It means fewer people feel spoken to.

And narrowing costs less than it feels like. You're not banning anyone from buying. A company outside your focus can still find you and still sign up. What you give up is the appearance of being for everyone. What you gain is being unmistakably for someone.

The same fear, in other clothes

Positioning that's "still being finalised", for the eighth month in a row.

"Let's grow our following first, then we'll sell."

"Should we do a podcast? Everyone's doing a podcast."

They all avoid the same moment: committing to something that might not work.

The customers they thought they'd lose

A founder I worked with had a SaaS product that could serve several industries, and was determined not to narrow. If the website said it was for one type of customer, everyone else might assume it wasn't for them.

So the website tried to speak to every use case at once. It was accurate. It was also almost impossible for anyone to feel addressed by it.

We tested a much narrower message around one customer group and one problem they kept running into. The founder was nervous. The audience was smaller, and that looked like a risk.

The first thing that changed wasn't traffic. It was the quality of the response. The right prospects recognised themselves immediately. Sales conversations became more specific. And customers from other industries still came through, just not because the headline was written for them.

The founder hadn't lost the customers they'd worried about. They'd stopped making the right ones work so hard to recognise themselves.

Narrow on purpose

Write down who it's for in one sentence, and who it isn't for in another.

Test the narrow message on the people it's for, not on everyone.

Then watch who responds. The people who recognise themselves quickly are your market. The others were never going to buy.

Broad feels safe. Specific gets chosen.