The Claude Prompt I Used to Find My Niche

Everyone online will tell you the same thing: you need to niche down.

And they're not wrong. You can't market to everybody, the messaging goes vague, nobody remembers what you do, and you end up competing on price with people who are much clearer than you are.

But here's why that advice is so hard to act on when you're actually good at things.

You look at your skills and you think: which one am I supposed to choose?

Project management. Tech. Systems. Automations. SOPs. Onboarding. Email marketing. Whatever your particular list is. And every single one of them is a real skill you've spent years getting good at, and someone is telling you to throw eleven of them away and become The Zapier Person.

So you don't choose. You keep offering everything, your messaging stays vague, and the whole thing sits in the too-hard pile for another six months.

I think you're being asked the wrong question.

Your niche probably isn't a skill

You don't necessarily need to niche down by skill. You need to work out what commercially valuable problem connects your skills together.

Take everything you're good at, stop looking at them one by one, and ask three things instead:

1. What type of problem do these skills collectively help me solve?
2. What do clients repeatedly come to me for?
3. Where does my work create the biggest impact on the business?

Here's what that looks like in practice.

Say you're good at project management, tech, systems, automation and SOPs. On a services page that reads as five unrelated things. But the common thread might be: you walk into businesses where the backend is an absolute mess and you make the operation actually work.

That's positioning.

You're no longer selling "project management, automations, SOPs, ClickUp setup and some tech stuff." You're the person who fixes messy operations. And then, depending on what's causing the mess, you reach for the right tool. One client needs an automation. Another needs their delivery process redesigned. Another needs someone to run the project properly.

The skill you use changes. The problem you're known for doesn't.

Your skills are the toolkit. The problem is the positioning.

That's the niche - the commercially valuable problem your best skills work together to solve.

The honest caveat

This is not a free pass to keep offering everything.

A pile of unrelated services with no commercial thread running through them is still confusing positioning, and calling it "I solve problems" doesn't fix it. The point isn't to avoid choosing. It's to find the organising idea that makes several of your skills add up to something.

And some of your skills genuinely won't make the core offer. That's fine - they don't stop existing, they just don't go on the front page. You're not throwing away years of experience. You're deciding what leads.

Why you can't work this out in your head

Because the thread connecting your skills is invisible from where you're standing.

To you, the things you're good at are just... things you do. Obvious. Unremarkable. You've never had to explain the connection between them because you've never needed to - you just do the work. Meanwhile the person who spots the pattern instantly is the one watching from outside.

You also can't hold it all at once. Fifteen years of experience, dozens of clients, all the things you enjoyed and all the things you dreaded - that's too much to sit and pattern-match on a Tuesday afternoon while your inbox is going.

So don't. Get it all out of your head first, then let something else find the shape in it.

Step 1 - The twenty minute brain dump

Before you prompt anything, you're going to talk. Not write - talk.

I use Wispr Flow for this, because it does voice to text and it'll let you go for twenty minutes straight without stopping. That matters, because the useful stuff never comes out in the first three minutes. It comes out at minute fourteen when you've stopped performing and you're just talking.

Don't structure it. Don't tidy it. Ramble. Go off on tangents - the tangents are often the best part.

Cover:

• Everything you love doing. The work where you look up and an hour's gone.
• Everything you hate doing. Be honest, this matters as much.
• Everything you're genuinely good at - and put in the boring ones. Especially the boring ones.
• Everything you think you're bad at.
• What frustrates you in a working day - and what doesn't, when it clearly frustrates other people.
• What you look forward to.
• What clients keep coming back to you for, even when it isn't what you were hired to do.
• What people ask your opinion on.
• The messes you've walked into before and sorted out. Describe them properly.
• Who you actually are. Your background, your career, the odd jobs, the corporate years, the thing you did for a decade that you think is irrelevant. It usually isn't.

That last one is the one people skip and it's often where the answer is hiding.

Step 2 - The prompt

Paste the transcript in with this.

Below is a twenty minute brain dump about me - what I love doing, what I hate,
what I'm good at, what I'm bad at, what frustrates me & who I am. It's unstructured
& rambly on purpose.

Also read my vault so you know my business as it stands today.

I'm trying to find my niche. I'm multi-skilled & the standard advice - "pick one
thing" - doesn't work for me, because everything I'd throw away is something I'm
genuinely good at.

So don't do that. Instead, find the commercially valuable PROBLEM that my skills
solve together.

Work through this:

1. Pull out everything I'm good at, including the things I mentioned in passing
   as though they were nothing. Especially those.

2. Look for the through-line. What kind of problem do these skills collectively
   fix? What sort of business is in trouble in a way that I specifically am built
   to solve?

3. Cross-check it against what I've said clients keep coming back to me for, &
   against the messes I've described sorting out before.

Then give me TWO OR THREE possible positions. Not ten. For each one:

- the problem, in one sentence, stated as the client would say it out loud - not
  as a service
- who has that problem, & what kind of business they run
- which of my skills feed into it, & why that combination is unusually good at it
- what I could actually sell to solve it
- which of my skills sit OUTSIDE this position & shouldn't be on the front page

Then tell me which one you'd pick & why. Include what I'd be giving up.

Rules:
- Do NOT give me a list of my skills back. I already know my skills. I want the
  thing underneath them.
- If one of my "positions" is really just a service with a nicer name, say so.
- If something I love doing isn't commercially valuable, tell me plainly & tell
  me where it should live instead.
- Don't be diplomatic. I'd rather hear it now than find out in six months of
  vague marketing.

The lines that matter

"Don't give me a list of my skills back." Without this you'll get your own brain dump summarised into bullet points, which feels productive and tells you nothing. You didn't need help remembering what you can do.

"Stated as the client would say it out loud." A niche you can only describe in your own industry language isn't a niche, it's a job title. "I fix messy operations" is something a founder recognises. "Operational systems consultancy" is something only you understand.

"Which of my skills sit outside this position." This is the part that makes it a decision rather than a summary. If nothing gets left out, nothing has been chosen.

"If one of my positions is really just a service with a nicer name, say so." Because that's the failure mode, and it's a very comfortable one to fall into.

What to do with the answer

You'll usually recognise the right one immediately - there's a small jolt of oh, that's what I've been doing for years.

If none of them land, that's information too. Read the ones it gave you and work out why they're wrong; that usually points straight at the real one. Then say so and run it again.

Once you've got it, that sentence becomes the thing everything else hangs off. Your LinkedIn headline. The first line of your about section. What you say when someone asks what you do. And it makes the next decision much easier - because once you know what problem you solve, working out what to sell stops being a guessing game.

Then run it again in six months

Your niche isn't a tattoo.

Mine has moved as the business has, and the version I'd have written two years ago isn't the one I'd write now. What stays constant is the method: get it all out of your head, find the thread, name the problem, build around that.

Stop asking which skill to throw away. Start asking what valuable problem lets them all work together.

If you haven't got your AI brain set up, that's the foundation for this and everything else here: start here.

And once you know the problem you solve, the next question is what to sell around it - which is exactly what this one covers: How I Boost My Income Without More Retainer Clients.

Watch the free training →