Issue #007
Why most coaching niches fail
There's a story Gary Halbert — one of the most famous direct response copywriters who ever lived — used to tell his students.
He'd ask the room: if you were about to open a hot dog stand and you could have one advantage over every other vendor out there, what would you want?
People would say things like better ingredients, a prime location, a lower price, a loyal customer base.
Halbert's answer was always the same: a starving crowd.
Doesn't matter how good your hot dogs are. Doesn't matter how well you've positioned yourself or how sharp your logo is. If the people walking past your stand aren't hungry, you're selling against the current all day.
Most coaches pick their niche backwards. They start with what they know, which is the right instinct, and they stop there, which is where it goes wrong. Expertise is the entry point. But expertise aimed at the wrong market is just a well-prepared pitch nobody asked for.
WHAT’S ON DECK
The Playbook: 4 tests to see if your market is actually worth pursuing
Real Wins: When one coach stopped targeting everyone who needed help
Your Next Move: Score your own niche before the end of this week
Steal This: A simple self-assessment you can run in under 20 min
Coachstack Connect: Keep your niche message consistent
YOUR MISSING PIECE
We're wrapping up Step 1 of the Coaching Flywheel: Clarify Your Focus. The last few issues covered what your niche should be: your “Information Advantage,” your positioning statement, and why broad kills your close rate.
This one covers whether the market you've chosen can actually support a real business. It's the filter most coaches skip, and it's the reason a lot of good coaches spend years working harder than the results justify.
THE PLAYBOOK
Why most coaching niches fail
Your “bad” coaching skills have nothing to do with a failing business. Most coaches fail because they picked a market that couldn't generate a sustainable pipeline — and then spent months wondering why nothing was clicking.
Alex Hormozi builds on Halbert's starving crowd idea in $100M Offers with four specific tests for evaluating a market before you commit to it.
I've adapted them below for coaches. Run your niche through all four before you read any further.
Test 1: Massive Pain
There's a difference between a market with preferences and a market with problems. Preferences are nice to have, but problems create buyers.
A coach who works with "people who want to feel more fulfilled at work" is addressing a preference. But a coach who works with "mid-career professionals who've been quietly passed over for promotion twice and are running out of time to figure out why"?
Well, they’re addressing a wound in need of attention.
The second group aren’t browsers. They're searching. They'll read the entire email, click the link, and then book the call.
The question to ask yourself: would someone in your target market describe their situation as a problem they need solved — or as a goal they'd like to reach eventually?
The first group has urgency, sure. But it’s the second group that has good intentions and a long list of other priorities.
At the end of the day, pain-driven markets move while aspiration-driven markets stall.
Test 2: Purchasing Power
This one is uncomfortable, but it matters.
Some markets have real pain and no budget. Passion for a population doesn't override the economics of whether they can actually pay you. Early-career coaches who want to help recent graduates navigate their first jobs (that's a generous impulse). But if those clients are carrying student debt, working entry-level salaries, and researching "free resources" before they'd ever pay for coaching, you'll work hard and charge less every time.
Purchasing power doesn't mean you only serve wealthy people. It means you're honest about whether the market you've chosen has the financial capacity to pay what your expertise is worth, at a frequency that supports a real business.
Hormozi puts it plainly: you want a market that can spend, is willing to spend, and has a history of spending on solutions to their problems. All three of those things matter, but one out of three isn't enough.
Test 3: Easy to Target
A niche that exists but can't be reached might as well not exist.
"Mid-career women feeling stuck" is a real group with real pain. It's also a group that's almost impossible to find without already knowing who they are. There's no obvious place they gather. No LinkedIn search that surfaces them or a community you can show up in.
"Mid-career women in healthcare considering a move into consulting" is the same impulse, sharpened. Now you have a LinkedIn search string. You have professional associations and publications they read. You also have a specific enough description that someone in your network says, “oh, I know someone who fits that exactly.”
Targetable doesn't mean easy. It means there's a path. When you know where your ideal clients spend their time — online, offline, in what forums, reading what content — you can show up there consistently without having to build an audience from scratch before anything else happens.
Test 4: Growing
You need a tailwind.
A market where the core problem is getting more common, more visible, or more widely acknowledged makes every part of your work easier. Your content is timely. Your offer is relevant. Word-of-mouth is already primed because people are already talking about the problem.
A market in active decline is a headwind you didn't need, but you can still succeed. The coaches who do are usually exceptional. But choosing a growing market over a shrinking one is one of the few free advantages left, and it costs nothing to factor it in.
Ask yourself: is the population of people who have this problem growing, shrinking, or flat? Is awareness of the problem increasing? Are people spending more, less, or the same on solving it than they were five years ago?
The answers won't always be clear. But asking the questions puts you ahead of most coaches who never thought to.
REAL WINS
A few years back, a career coach I know spent the first 14 months of her practice targeting recent college graduates. The fit made sense on paper — she had a background in talent acquisition and knew exactly what hiring managers were looking for. Her content was good. Her process was solid.
But the clients she was attracting couldn't sustain consistent engagement. Sessions were infrequent. Packages were short. Referrals were rare, because her clients were navigating their first jobs and not yet embedded in professional networks that included other people like them.
Turns out, she was just selling to the wrong end of the problem.
When she shifted her focus to mid-career professionals making deliberate moves into new industries — people with 10+ years of experience, actual budgets, and strong professional networks — the business changed in about three months.
Same coaching skills, content calendar, and hell, even the same outreach habits. The only difference was in the market.
The new clients came in better prepared, engaged more consistently, paid higher rates without negotiating, and referred people they knew personally. One referral came from a client who'd been introduced to her through a former colleague at a VP-level conference.
That client went on to refer two more.
Nothing about her coaching changed. Nada.
What did change was the market she was speaking to...
TL;DR
Three things worth keeping from this issue:
Expertise aimed at the wrong market is just an offer nobody asked for. Your Information Advantage matters. So does the population you're pointing it at.
All four tests matter. Pain without purchasing power gets you clients who cancel. Purchasing power without pain gets you lukewarm engagement. A market that's shrinking makes the whole game harder. None of these problems fix themselves.
This isn't about finding a perfect niche. It's about making an honest evaluation before you spend 12 months building something in a market that was never going to pay off.
STEAL THIS
Niche Market Self-Assessment
Score your current niche on each of the four criteria below. Use a 1–5 scale (1 = weak, 5 = strong). Be honest. A self-assessment you talk yourself into doesn't help you.