Everyone needs it. That's the problem.

Everyone who sees The Open Journal agrees it matters. Everyone has parents. Everyone, one day, will wish they had recorded them. I built that brand with my friend Pri, and for a year we treated that universality as the good news. A product every family needs. Imagine the market. Then this morning, on a call about why it still sells slowly, I heard myself say the opposite out loud. Stop trying to reach everyone. Own the subset. That sentence is the most useful thing I have said about positioning this year, and it came from our own mistake, not a client's.

Everyone is not an audience

Here is how a universal product fails. Nobody objects to it. Everybody agrees with it. And nobody feels it was made for them, because it wasn't. It was made for families, which means it was made for a category, and nobody wakes up thinking of themselves as a category.

I went looking for the demand the way I would for a client. Search research, the lot. The market, in the sense of people typing what we sell into Google, barely exists. Nobody searches for a film of their grandmother telling her own story, because nobody thinks to want one until they see it. When they do see it, they get it instantly. The reaction, almost every time, is some version of: I had never thought of that.

That tells you something uncomfortable. When there is no search to catch, there is no crowd to be found in. You don't get discovered by everyone. You get passed along by someone. And someone always belongs to a somewhere.

Everyone is not a market. It is a hope with a website. — on selling to everyone

The subset that already knows

Our somewhere is obvious once you say it. Pri and I both come from UK Gujarati families. So do most of the people who have asked us about The Open Journal so far. In our families the grandparents are still the ones holding the stories: the arrival, the first shop, the first house, the village the grandchildren have only heard about. A lot of those stories are told best in Gujarati. Pri can sit across from a grandparent and ask the question in the language the answer lives in.

That is not a feature on a pricing page. It is the difference between a stranger filming your nan and one of us sitting at her kitchen table. No competitor can buy it, at any price.

A subset also talks to itself. The same families share weddings, temples, community halls and group chats. Inside that circle, one film doesn't reach one family. It gets talked about at the next gathering. If you built your business on referrals, this should sound familiar. Word of mouth never worked across a whole country. It worked inside a room where people already trusted each other. Own the room first.

In practice, owning it is unglamorous. The next fifty pounds we put behind an ad goes to that community, not the whole country. The films we share first are the ones those families will recognise themselves in. None of it needs a new product, a new price or a new website. It needs a decision about who we are talking to.

Narrow feels like losing

I know the objection, because we made it. We said everyone should get this. Spread it wide. Don't box it in. It sounds generous. It sounds ambitious. It is actually fear: the fear that naming who it is for quietly tells everyone else it isn't for them.

But the families outside our community were never going to find us through a broad message either. Broad reached nobody. Specific reaches somebody, and somebody tells somebody. The subset isn't the ceiling. It is the way in.

There is a sting in this for me, professionally. It is exactly what I tell founders in the workshop, and it took a slow year on our own brand for me to say it about something I built. From the outside, the advice is easy. From the inside, "everyone" feels like the safe choice every single time.

We haven't made the change yet. The website still speaks to every family. The next few months are where we find out whether owning the subset does what I have just argued it will.

The same mistake in your business

You don't sell films of grandparents. But if your homepage says you work with businesses of every size across every sector, you have made the same bet we did. You are relying on universality to do the work that specificity should.

The test is simple. Can you name the group of people who would understand what you do without you explaining it? Not a demographic. A group that already talks to each other: a trade, a region, an industry body, a community. If you can name them and your website doesn't speak to them first, you have found your gap.

The best result I have had for a client came from exactly this. A GP practice in North London asked for photographs of its new building. The real job was to make the practice visible to the people who could actually register there, so the search campaigns, the social content and the photography were all pointed at one catchment, not the whole city.

It will feel like shrinking. It isn't.

One thing to do this week

Write down the one group that would get what you do fastest. Then rewrite the first line of your homepage as if only they will ever read it. Don't worry about everyone else yet. The people outside that group will still find you, the same way they always have: because someone inside it told them. If you can't name the group at all, that is the conversation the Brand Clarity Workshop is built for. Four hours, the founder, a written report. £1,500, fixed.