In this solo YouTube talk, Nicolas Cole argues that the common fear of "niching down"—that being too specific limits business opportunity—is a faulty belief. He illustrates the point by focusing on the problem of people’s racing thoughts that prevent sleep, framing it through psychology and spirituality rather than generic health advice. Cole explains that while the niche seems narrow, the underlying issue (overthinking before bed) is universal, meaning a highly specific focus can actually open massive market potential. He shares his own decade‑long experience as a ghostwriter, detailing how he accumulated over 10,000 hours solely on that niche, building an agency, training materials, a premium academy, and a forthcoming book. This deep immersion revealed how a single niche contains endless depth, making beginners realize that trying to solve many problems at once is unrealistic. Cole emphasizes that specificity helps clear the deck, allowing one to master a problem thoroughly and create scalable products—books, digital courses, conferences—around it. He concludes with a promotional plug for his free "StartWritingOnline" masterclass, aimed at aspiring online writers.
Chapters
Let's say we niche down on the problem of sleep, okay? A lot of times people struggle with sleep through, and let's talk about it through the lens of psychology and spirituality, okay? We're not talking about like health and wellness. A lot of times people struggle with sleep because of overthinking. Their mind is racing, it's time to go to bed, and they can't get their thoughts to slow down. And as a result, they have a really hard time falling asleep. And they cope with that problem by putting a TV in their room and turning on Netflix, which is the worst thing that you can do because all that blue light ends up disrupting your sleep even more. Right. And then you become reliant on this sound and it takes you 2 hours to fall asleep every night. And then you wake up the next day and you're not as well rested. I think we all know this, this problem. Now, if I said, I think you should niche down to the point where you help people, whether it's through a lens of psychology or spirituality, gain control over their racing thoughts before bed so that they can bring themselves into a calm state so that they can have a good night of sleep and no longer be reliant on Netflix Putting them to bed. Most people would tell me that that is way too specific. And yet, let's ask the follow-up question. How many people in the world do we think have a hard time turning off their brain to go to sleep? Almost everyone who is high functioning or, you know, everyone. Everyone, right? And so that, that is the— this is like the hardest idea to understand when it comes to niching down, is that everyone thinks that niching down means I am limiting opportunity. And it's not opportunity that's getting limited. What's getting limited— and, and it's, it's a good thing— what's getting limited is that you are not trying to solve every problem for every person. What you're trying to do is you're trying to solve one problem or one group of problems, and those problems, because they are so specific, end up being so universal, right? And so I think this, like, whenever I, I'm answering questions around niche Oftentimes there's two, there's two big things that I notice. One is this faulty belief of if I get too specific, I'm limiting opportunity, which is not true. And I just walked you through why. And the second issue is that, and I think this is, this is very common for, for people who haven't yet committed to one niche because now, like, I, I have learned this lesson so much because I've committed to a niche for 10 years. So like, I've, I've learned what this actually looks like. Until you commit to one specific niche for a prolonged period of time, you don't actually realize yet how difficult it is to even solve one problem for people. Like, every beginner thinks, I can, I can solve lots of different problems. And you can, but that doesn't like— but that's not the path to getting to where you're trying to go. A great example is like ghostwriting. For— I'll use ghostwriting. I started ghostwriting in 2016. That was a decade ago. I then spent thousands of hours, like north of 5,000 hours ghostwriting for executives. And the whole time I was doing that, I also was building training documents for all the people I employed inside my ghostwriting agency. So pretty much 14 hours a day, I was either thinking about ghostwriting, talking to clients and selling them on ghostwriting, actually ghostwriting, or training or creating training materials for all of the writers inside our company to ghostwrite. Then After that, we started PGA, which is our premium ghostwriting academy. And then I've spent over the past 3.5 years, I've spent another 3,000, 4,000 hours talking about ghostwriting, answering questions about ghostwriting, creating documentation, teaching ghostwriters how to do what I do, creating frameworks, writing a book about ghostwriting. So all told, I mean, easily, easily 10,000 hours of just talking about ghostwriting. And I will tell you that today, a decade later, 10,000 hours of doing nothing but talking about that one topic. Today, I have never been more aware of how much more work I need to do in order to really continue helping people become great ghostwriters. And this is like one of those things that you, it is so hard to wrap your head around as a beginner because as a beginner you think, well, I could solve this problem and I could solve this problem and I could help this person and I could do this thing over here. And the lesson that you haven't learned yet is when you commit to just one thing, the more that you do that one thing, the more that you realize, A, how much deeper that rabbit hole goes, and B, how hilarious it is that you ever thought you could do more than just that one thing. You're humbled by it. I wake up humbled every single day because I'm like, what, Nicolas Cole, what were you thinking 10 years ago? You really thought you were going to build like 10 different businesses helping 10 different people all at once? 10,000 hours. I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface on one. And so I share all of that to point out that like so much of where people struggle with niching down is just you don't have the pattern recognition yet to realize that the way that you're thinking about it is, it's the opposite. Like you think, okay, I can help lots of people, but it's the opposite. It's, no, you can really only dig into one person and help that one person. And you think like, oh, if I do that for like 3 months or 6 months, then I can move on to the next one. No, you could do it for 10 years and you would still feel like there's more to do, you know. And so that, that, that's fundamentally why when it comes to niching down, specificity is such a good thing because it, it really makes you realize— it, it, it helps you clear the deck. And go, I'm not going to try and chase 10, 10 birds at once. I'm just going to focus on doing one thing really, really well. And going back to our example, it's like, how much opportunity do you think there is in the world to only talk about psychology or manifestation or spirituality just through the lens of helping people sleep through the night? You could write books on that. You could create digital products on that. You could, you could scale that and have entire spirituality sleep conferences where people fly in from all over the world for a 3-day Tony Robbins-style event. Like, you— the world is your oyster. The part that, that problem or that topic, for example, is not too small. There's like quite literally an overwhelming amount of opportunity. And even you, like, and just to take it one step further, like, even you, if you built a $10 million a year business doing that, I would still tell the next person who said, "I'm also interested in spirituality, sleep, whatever," I would still tell them to do the same thing that you're doing. Because, like, a $10 million a year business is not everyone in the world. You do not own 100% of that market. You own maybe, like, 1% of that market.
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