Let me show you two product ideas.
Product A: “A guide for people who want to make money online.”
Product B: “A guide for elementary school teachers who want to turn their existing lesson plans into printables they can sell on Etsy — without building a brand or an audience first.”
Same category. Totally different products.
Product A is for everyone. Which means it’s for no one. The person reading the description thinks “that’s me” for about half a second, then keeps scrolling because nothing in it speaks to their specific situation. The title could describe three hundred other products on the same platform. There’s nothing to hold onto.
Product B is for a specific person. That person reads it and thinks “this is exactly what I’ve been trying to figure out.” They don’t need to be convinced it’s for them — it’s obviously for them. The specificity does the selling.
Here’s the thing: the product inside both of those descriptions could be nearly identical.
The difference in who buys it comes almost entirely from whether the person described in the title feels like you’re talking directly to them.
Why Vague Feels Safe (And Isn’t)
When you’re building your first product, the instinct is to keep the audience broad.
More people means more potential buyers. A wider net means more fish. If you narrow down too much, you might be cutting yourself off from customers.
This logic makes complete sense and it’s completely wrong.
A vague audience doesn’t give you more potential buyers. It gives you a product that doesn’t strongly appeal to any of them. You’re not widening a funnel, you’re building a product that converts no one because it was designed for everyone.
The math goes the other way.
A product that speaks directly to one specific person, in their specific situation, with their specific problem, will outsell a product built for everyone in that category every single time.
Not because there are more of them, there are fewer.
Because the specific person feels like this product was made for them, and the specific feeling of “this is exactly what I need” is the thing that converts interest into a purchase.
The Difference Between a Category and a Person
Here’s the test.
Can you picture the person who would buy your product?
Not a demographic.
Not an age range.
An actual person?
Where are they right now?
What are they trying to do?
What have they already tried that didn’t work?
What’s the thing that’s blocking them from getting where they want to go?
If you can’t answer those questions specifically, you don’t have an audience. You have a category.
Categories don’t buy things.
People do.
“People who want to lose weight” is a category.
“New moms six to twelve months postpartum trying to lose the last fifteen pounds with only twenty minutes a day before the kids wake up” — that’s a person.
That person reads the title and feels seen.
That feeling is worth more than any amount of marketing you could run.
“Freelancers” is a category.
“Graphic designers quoting their first client who panic and drop the number the second the client hesitates” — that’s a person.
If that’s you, you buy the product instantly. Because it named the thing you’ve been embarrassed about for months.
The specificity isn’t about limiting your reach. It’s about making your product feel inevitable to the person who needs it.
What Happens to Vague Products
The vague product gets listed. It gets some views, there are plenty of people in the broad category.
But the click-through rate is low because nothing in the title jumps out at any specific person.
The people who do click read the description and feel vaguely interested but not compelled.
They don’t buy.
You tweak the price. You rewrite the description. You change the main image.
The numbers barely move.
Not because the product is bad. Because it was never specific enough to make anyone feel like it was theirs.
The frustrating part is that the fix isn’t more marketing, better SEO, or a lower price point.
The fix is going back upstream and deciding, specifically, who this is for.
Once you know that, the title writes itself, the description practically writes itself, and the people who find it know within three seconds whether it’s for them.
That’s not a listing problem. That’s a product positioning problem. And it starts before you build anything.
The Specific Person Already Exists
Here’s the honest version of why this matters.
The product inside you, the knowledge you have that someone else needs , it already has an audience.
A specific one.
Not a broad category of aspirational people, but a specific kind of person going through a specific kind of situation that you’ve already been through.
You know who they are because you were them.
The 28-year-old trying to get her first three clients as a virtual assistant.
The guy who bought a rental property and has no idea how to manage the bookkeeping.
The nurse who wants to monetize her shift optimization system because she’s described it to ten coworkers who all asked for a copy.
Those people exist.
They’re searching for help right now.
And the reason most products don’t reach them isn’t because the product is bad.
It’s because the product said “people who want to make money online” when it should have said their name.
Specificity Is the Moat
“Productivity” is a disaster of a niche.
There are ten thousand products in it.
Nobody owns it.
Nobody’s product feels essential because the category is too crowded with too many things aimed at too many different people.
“Productivity for night shift nurses with three kids” is a business.
Maybe a small one. But a real one.
Because the nurse who works nights and has three kids reads that and thinks: finally. Someone made this for me.
That feeling, finally, someone made this for me is the whole game.
You can’t manufacture it by being clever about your SEO or designing a better cover.
You earn it by being specific enough that the person you built it for doesn’t need to be convinced.
They just need to find it.
Getting specific about who your product is for is the first step — but it only works if you pick the right intersection of knowledge and audience. There’s a 60-minute exercise for finding that. Product Picker Workbook