Every product team faces a version of the same question: how narrow should we go?

The instinct is to stay broad. Broad means more potential customers. More use cases. A bigger addressable market on the slide deck. The fear with going narrow is that you’re leaving value on the table — there’s a user over here who almost fits, and another one over there, and if you just made the product a little more general you could serve them all.

The problem is that “a little more general” compounds. Every time you widen scope to capture adjacent users, you make something that fits no one perfectly. The product that serves ten use cases at 60% tends to lose to the product that serves one use case at 95%.

Depth is what makes a tool worth paying for.

A generic tool can be replaced by other generic tools. The user has lots of options. They’re not paying for something irreplaceable — they’re paying for convenience. That puts a ceiling on what you can charge and means your retention depends on inertia rather than value.

A deep tool is harder to replace. It knows things the alternatives don’t. It speaks the vocabulary of the domain. It produces output in the format the practitioner actually uses. It catches the errors that a generic tool would miss because a generic tool doesn’t know what an error looks like in this context.

When a practitioner finds a tool that actually fits their workflow — not approximately, but precisely — they stop looking. The search cost for replacing it is high. The risk of adopting something that turns out to be shallower is real. The switching cost is the accumulated trust in the tool’s output, which takes time to rebuild with any alternative.

Going narrow has a counterintuitive pricing implication.

The narrower the use case, the higher you can charge — up to a point. This seems backwards. If you’re serving fewer people, shouldn’t the price be lower?

The logic runs the other direction. A narrow tool serves a smaller market, but it serves that market at a much higher value density. If your tool saves a professional analyst two hours per deal and they do twenty deals a quarter, the math is easy — the tool is worth a lot more than a subscription price suggests.

Generic tools compete on price because they’re substitutable. Vertical tools compete on value because they’re not. The pricing reflects the substitutability, not the feature count.

There’s also a distribution advantage to going narrow.

The practitioners in a specific domain talk to each other. They share tools. They have newsletters, communities, annual conferences, and trusted voices who tell them what’s worth using.

A generic tool has to find its users in the noise of the general market. A vertical tool can find its users in a specific community, through a specific channel, by speaking a specific language that makes it immediately recognizable as built for them.

“This tool is for CRE analysts who do acquisition due diligence” is a sentence that some people will immediately understand and most people will ignore. That’s exactly right. The people who ignore it aren’t your customers. The people who immediately understand it know exactly whether they need it.

The niche depth tradeoff isn’t really a tradeoff. It’s a decision about which kind of competition you want to be in.

Broad means competing in a crowded market on features, integrations, and price. It means constant pressure from better-funded competitors who can out-feature you. It means churn when a user finds something cheaper or marginally better.

Narrow means competing in a small market where you can be genuinely best. It means practitioners who stick around because there’s nothing else like it. It means pricing power because value exceeds cost by a significant margin.

The market is smaller. The percentage of that market you can capture is much larger. And the customers you get are the kind who refer other customers because they found something that actually works.

Going narrow isn’t leaving value on the table. It’s choosing which table to sit at.