July Retrospective: Back in July 2014, I wrote a daily series exploring the realities of navigating the creative economy. Twelve years later, looking back at these entries (and my original awful hand-drawn illustrations!), I’m struck by how the core truths of a creative career remain completely timeless. Each day this month, I’m opening up the archive to share these foundational lessons—with a few modern reflections layered in.

If you’re a new creative graduate looking to find your footing in the creative economy, a Gen X looking to pivot into a creative business, a side-hustler or someone who just wants to up their creative business game, there’s something for you in this series. Just don’t judge my drawings 😉

Why You Want a Narrow Niche

You cannot serve everyone. Trying to serve everyone is the quickest way to guarantee you serve no one.

You want to find a narrow, small, well-defined niche who need what you have to offer – and serve them. Sample niches: TV Casting Directors, first-time moms in their 30’s, sports mad university students, qualifying lawyers, stressed executives in their 40’s, mid-size ballet companies, retired baby boomers. These are all specific niches. You can effectively market yourself to one of these niches – if they are the right fit for what you are offering. You can’t successfully market to all of them. You wouldn’t have the time or the resources to contact all of them, and even if you did your products or services would not be what they need. It would be a waste of time.

You want to serve one niche and one niche only. That doesn’t mean that other people might not come knocking on your door! You might be marketing to single mums in their 20’s and a groovy grandmother happens to also like your work – great! You can still sell to her. But she’s not your target market. Now if you find after a year that you’ve sold more of your product to groovy grandmothers than 20’s moms, then you can change your target, but you can only aim for one target at a time.

You want to get as narrow as you can with your niche. Let’s use our groovy grandmothers (or GG’s). Do you want to market to all GG’s globally? Probably not. You would struggle to reach them and serve them. All GG’s in the English speaking world? More narrow but still a pretty big net. You might expand in time to cover a territory of that size but it seems unwieldy.  Why not be kind on yourself and start with a market you can actually manage – GG’s in your city, territory or country?  Now you’ve got a patch that you probably know fairly well and you can also use existing connections you have to help you reach them.

Action: Who is the one narrow niche you are going to serve? Describe them in one sentence that narrows them down to a size you can actually successfully manage.

Longevity in a creative career isn’t accidental—it’s built on strategy.

While the landscape shifts, the core principles of thriving as a creative freelancer haven’t changed. For deeper, modern frameworks on building a sustainable creative practice:

• Read the Book: Looking for a step-by-step field guide to building a resilient career in the creative economy? Pick up my recent book The Thriving Creative: Successful Freelancing in the Creative Economy available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and from my publisher Routledge.
• Stay Connected: Join my community and to receive the complete 31-day hand-drawn playbook as a single PDF at the end of the month. Sign up below.