I love the Internet. It brings together all these "weird" communities and subcultures.

Recently I got a video in my social feed about a controversy going on in the fountain pen community.

Yes, seriously.

My first reaction was, "There's a fountain pen community??"

My second reaction was, "There's CONTROVERSY in the fountain pen community!??

If ever there was a community where I'd expect peace and tranquility, it would be a fountain pen community. 😂

Google "Lamy dark lilac controversy" if you think I'm messing with you.

It really brought home to me the importance of focusing on and understanding a niche.

Here's a passage from page 33 of my new book Lean Marketing:

"I’ll often ask someone who thinks they’ve niched down what their target market is, and they’ll say something like “women over 40 years old.” Great, so that’s narrowed it down to 1.5 billion people.

What do we do with that?

While I wouldn’t say you can’t be too niche, chances are that when you think you’ve niched enough, you probably haven’t.

You want your niche to be an inch wide and a mile deep. An inch wide means you target a very tightly defined segment or subsegment of a market. A mile deep means a large enough addressable market is looking for a solution to a specific problem.

This doesn’t have to be a huge market. It just needs to be the right market for you. You can be successful beyond your wildest dreams, even if 99.9 percent of the planet has never heard of you.

Have you nailed your inch-wide, mile-deep niche?