Concentric Circles Niche Targeting
Fill in the bullseye of one dream customer before expanding to mass market
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 90%
Asked to reconcile Shark Tank's mass-market gospel with her niche-first stance, Star concedes the sharks are right about the destination but puts a stake in the ground about the route: mass market appeal is very difficult to reach without first carving and defining your niche. The mechanism is a target. Your niche is the centre point. Once you fill in that centre and speak to that audience so clearly they recognise themselves, you add concentric circles outward. She narrows further than most: not a segment but one person, your dream customer. Content for a 34-year-old flannel-wearing farmer who listens to country music resonates completely differently to content for a 56-year-old Manhattan mother who holidays in the Hamptons. The distribution half is her kingdom analogy — your business is a kingdom on a hill, and nobody knows until you go down into the village: comments longer than four words, likes on dream-customer photos, daily DM replies.
Origin
Extracted from Young and Profiting
Core principles
- 01Mass market appeal is real, but it is very difficult to reach without first defining a niche.
- 02Your niche is the centre point of a target; circles are added outward, never inward.
- 03Create content for one person, not for a demographic.
- 04Speaking clearly to one person does not repel others — vagueness does.
- 05Nobody knows your account exists yet; that is the actual constraint, not your quality.
How to run it
- 1
Accept the sequence
Mass market appeal is the goal, but it comes after the niche, not instead of it. Carve and define the niche first, then expand outward.
Watch out Skipping to broad appeal produces content so general nobody recognises themselves in it.
- 2
Name one person
Do not stop at a niche — narrow to a single dream customer. Specify them concretely enough that you can picture their clothes, music, and drink.
Pro tip Star's own worked example: the 34-year-old farmer in flannel who likes hard hats, country music, and Budweiser.
- 3
Answer three questions about them
Write down what that person wants, what they need, and what solutions they are looking for. Those answers become the content brief.
- 4
Take the pressure off
Stop trying to produce the most profound content of your life. Very few people know your account exists — that is the constraint, not the quality of your work.
Pro tip Reframing this removes the paralysis that stops small accounts posting at all.
- 5
Go down into the village
Your kingdom sits on a hill and nobody knows. Descend daily: leave comments longer than four words, like the photos of likely dream customers, and answer every DM.
Pro tip If DMs are scarce, vote in polls and reply to stories — any response signals interest to the algorithm.
Watch out Posting content without outbound engagement leaves the kingdom invisible no matter how good it is.
- 6
Add circles outward
Only once the centre point is filled in and that audience is clearly served, add concentric circles around it to reach adjacent audiences.
Watch out Expanding before the centre is solid dilutes the clarity that made the niche work.
In the wild
Star answers the objection that writing for one person means nobody else buys by showing what one-person content actually looks like. Content built for a 34-year-old farmer who wears flannel and hard hats, listens to country music, and drinks Budweiser is a completely different artefact from content built for a 56-year-old Manhattan woman with four children who holidays in the Hamptons. Neither would recognise themselves in a caption aimed at 'everyone'. Her framing: the big question is whether you know who your dream customer is, because once you build that out, your content becomes entirely different.
→ Specificity produces content that resonates, where broad targeting produces content that resonates with nobody.
A listener, Catherine, asks what advice Star would give someone with a new or small Instagram account. Star's answer is that Catherine's obscurity is not a quality problem — not because she isn't amazing, not because her product isn't unrivalled, simply because nobody knows she is there. The prescription is give, give, give: comments over four words, likes on dream-customer photos, and a DM response every single day. Where DMs don't exist yet, vote on story polls and reply to stories instead.
→ Outbound daily engagement makes the account visible to the exact people most likely to convert.
Common mistakes
Chasing mass market first
Broad appeal is the destination, not the starting move. Without a defined centre point, the content is too vague for anyone to claim.
Assuming one-person content repels everyone else
Star says studies and business owners show the opposite. Precision creates resonance; the fear of exclusion produces generic work nobody responds to.
Posting without engaging
You cannot put content up and skip the outbound work. Nobody discovers the kingdom on the hill unless you go down into the village.
Is it for you?
Best for
Small business owners or new accounts trying to grow from a standing start with no budget.
Not ideal for
Established mass-market brands whose bullseye audience is already saturated and who need breadth, not depth.
From the transcript
“it's very difficult to get mass market appeal without first and foremost carving and defining your niche”
“you want to think about your niche being the center point of a target and the minute you fill in that center point and the…”
“we want to create a little tiny kingdom that is your business and your kingdom is up on a hill and then there's the villagers…”
From the episode
Jasmine Star: Stand Out On Social
Jasmine Star