Stop looking for a niche. YOU are the niche.

A really good friend of mine is like a modern spiritual master. She’s been doing spiritual coaching so far but would love to take her business to the next level.

If she were to take traditional advice, she would be told to pick the audience she wants to serve (or in marketing speak : pick her Ideal Client Avatar or ICA), know that ICA like no-one’s business, and start tailoring her entire business to serving them.

That’s great advice. As entrepreneurs, we all, in one way or another, work like this. Tons of people have achieved success this way, and if you vibe with this approach, by all means go for it.

But there’s a different route.

The ICA approach is very customer centric; it’s about understanding the customer you want to serve and giving her what she wants. Nothing wrong with being customer centric. In fact almost every amazingly successful business has been laser focused on this approach, with the biggest success of all, Amazon, turning it into its religion.

But there was another super successful company that wasn’t customer focused. Apple.

Steve Jobs was in fact famously against asking customers what they wanted and needed. Ford was also another one of these companies, John Ford famously saying ‘if I’d asked customers for what they…