If you can't describe your user in a sentence so specific it almost feels embarrassing, you don't have an audience. You have a category. Categories don't buy software. People do.
The "everyone" trap
"Productivity tool for everyone" sounds like a bigger market than "intake-form tool for solo immigration paralegals." It isn't. The first one has zero people who urgently need it. The second one has 4,000 people who would pay tomorrow.
The smaller your niche, the easier it is to: write copy that sounds like it was written for the reader, find your first 50 users (see Distribution-First Thinking), price honestly, and avoid competing with everyone in the broad category.
The "name three real people" test
Can you name three real humans, by first name, who have this exact problem and would pay you for a fix? If not, your niche is still too big. Keep narrowing — by industry, by company size, by workflow, by tool stack — until you can.
How to narrow without losing the market
Founders panic that a tiny niche is a tiny business. It almost never is. A 4,000-person niche at $50/month is $200K MRR if you get 100% penetration — and you won't, but you also won't stay locked in that niche forever. You start there, win, then expand to adjacent niches with the same workflow shape.
Concrete narrowing exercise
- Start: "freelancers"
- Narrow by industry: "freelance writers"
- Narrow by sub-niche: "freelance B2B SaaS writers"
- Narrow by stage: "freelance B2B SaaS writers earning $5K–$20K/month"
- Narrow by pain: "…who waste 6+ hours/week on invoicing and chase payments manually"
That last sentence is a launchable audience. The first one isn't.
For a structured score on whether your audience is specific enough, see the Target Audience dimension in The 8 Dimensions.