Ask a founder who their product is for and listen for the word anyone. Anyone with a sales team. Anyone who handles compliance. Anyone who hates spreadsheets.

It is usually true and it is commercially useless, because it means every piece of writing you produce has to work for everybody, which means it can be specific about nobody.

Generic copy is almost never a writing problem

It is a decision problem wearing a writing costume. The writer is doing their best with a brief that forbids precision.

You can tell because the fix never works. You hire a better writer, the copy gets more elegant, and it still says nothing, because the constraint was upstream.

What narrowing actually means

Not shrinking your market. Choosing who the marketing talks to, which is a different decision and a reversible one.

You can sell to anyone and still write for one segment. The segment you choose should be where you win most easily, not where the market is biggest.

The five minute test

Take your homepage headline and ask whether a direct competitor could put it on their site unchanged. If they could, it is not positioning, it is category description.

Then ask whether anybody would disagree with it. If nobody could possibly object, you have said nothing.

The uncomfortable part

Narrowing means saying out loud that some customers matter more than others, and somebody in the business will have a relationship with a customer who falls outside the line.

That conversation is the actual work. The copy afterwards is easy.

Narrowing feels like shrinking. It is almost always the opposite.

Write down who you are deliberately not for. One paragraph. It will be the most useful document your marketing produces this year, and nobody outside the company ever needs to see it.