Stop Saying "For Everyone"

"Who is this product for?"

"Everyone, really. Anyone who wants to be more productive."

That answer is a failure.

Why "Everyone" Doesn't Work

A product for everyone is a product for no one.

When you target everyone, you can't make decisions. Every feature request seems valid. Every piece of copy tries to appeal to everyone. Nothing is sharp enough to resonate.

"Specificity is what makes things stick. You can't be specific about everyone."

Seth Godin articulated this in This Is Marketing: "When you seek to engage with everyone, you rarely reach anyone. Generic means invisible."

Generic targeting produces generic products, generic marketing, and generic results.

The Fear Behind "Everyone"

Founders say "everyone" because they're afraid of shrinking their market.

"If I say it's for indie builders, I'll lose enterprise customers."

This fear is backwards. Specificity doesn't shrink markets. It expands them.

When Slack targeted developers first, they didn't limit themselves. They created a foothold. The specificity gave them traction. Traction led to expansion.

Peter Thiel calls this "dominating a small market first" in Zero to One: "The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors."

"Generic targeting leads to no traction at all. Specificity creates the wedge."

How Specific Is Specific Enough?

Your audience description should pass two tests:

1. Can You Picture a Real Person?

Not a demographic. A person with a name, a morning routine, a specific frustration.

"25-54 year old males interested in technology" is useless.

"A solo developer who just shipped their first product on Product Hunt and realized it looks exactly like everyone else's" is a person.

2. Would Some People Say "That's Not Me"?

If everyone feels included, you're not specific enough.

Good specificity creates recognition for some and rejection for others. That's the point.

Example: Bad vs Good

Bad: "For businesses that want to improve their branding."

This describes every business. It creates no picture. It attracts no one specifically.

Good: "For solo technical founders who shipped something real but look generic."

This is a person. They know if they're being described. They feel seen or they don't.

"Specificity creates recognition. Recognition creates connection. Connection creates conversion."

The Exclusion Benefit

Specific targeting excludes people. That's the point.

When your landing page says "for indie builders," enterprise prospects know this isn't for them. They leave. Good.

You want people to self-select. Visitors who don't fit waste everyone's time. Let them leave early so you can focus on the ones who stay.

Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom, wrote about this: "The biggest conversion improvement we made was saying clearly who we weren't for. Wrong-fit visitors stopping earlier in the funnel improved every metric downstream."

Exclusion isn't losing customers. It's respecting everyone's time.

Finding Your Specific Audience

Ask yourself these questions:

Who gets the most value from this product? Not who could use it. Who benefits most intensely.

Who would pay the most for it? Price sensitivity reveals value perception.

Who would be angriest if it went away? Dependency indicates fit.

Who tells others about it? Advocates reveal your true audience.

The answers might all be the same person. That's your audience.

If the answers are different, you haven't found your core yet.

The Superhuman Example

Superhuman didn't target "people who use email." They targeted "extremely busy people who live in their inbox and value speed."

That's specific. You know immediately if you're that person or not.

Rahul Vohra, Superhuman's CEO, explained their targeting in a First Round Review interview: "We asked users to rate how disappointed they'd be if they could no longer use Superhuman. We only focused on the 'very disappointed' segment."

The result: 40% very disappointed became 70% very disappointed. Satisfaction increased by narrowing focus, not broadening it.

Write It Down and Lock It

Once you've identified your specific audience, document it.

Not just demographics. Their situation. Their frustration. The exact moment they realize they need something like this.

Write: - Who they are specifically - What they're trying to accomplish - What frustrates them about current options - The moment they look for something new

Then lock it. Every marketing decision gets filtered through this person. Does this speak to them? Does this solve their problem?

"Specificity is a constraint. Constraints enable decisions."

Stop saying "everyone." Start saying who exactly.

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Ready to define your audience? Try the Vox Animus demo to build your Brand Schema from specific foundations.