How many slices does a pizza have?

Most people would say 8.

That‘s the typical answer. But it’s not the only one.

A normal pie cut gives you 8 slices. A tavern cut can have 24. A strip cut might have 6–10. A quad cut has 4. No cut at all? That’s 1 slice. (You animal.)

Pizza can be cut a lot of different ways. Your agency can be positioned differently too.

The most common positioning slice is by industry. That‘s called “vertical positioning.”

Examples:

We help law firms.

We work in healthcare.

We specialize in real estate.

This is the easiest and most obvious slice. That’s why so many agencies stop here.

But you could also slice by what you do. That‘s “horizontal positioning.” You narrow by solution instead of industry.

Examples:

We make accounting software.

We run Instagram campaigns.

We build content management systems.

A third way to slice: who you work with. This is “diagonal positioning.” You focus on a role or type of person.

We work with influencers.

We help moms.

We partner with authors.

The real fun starts when you start combining slicing techniques. What would it look like if you sliced vertically, horizontally, and diagonally?

Examples:

We help law firm leaders become authors with AI.

We help moms in healthcare run Instagram campaigns.

We build content management systems for influencers in real estate.

These sound like a mad-libs exercise gone wrong. That’s a good thing.

When you look closer, the markets are actually considerable:

There are roughly ~600K law firm partners in the U.S. If even 10% of them wanted to grow their personal brands by write a book, that’s 60,000 potential law firm partner clients you could help become authors.

There are about 1M people who fit the description of “female healthcare professionals active on Instagram who have children.” If 10% of them want to be serious about business on Instagram, that’s 100,000 potential moms in healthcare clients you could help run Instagram campaigns.

Of ~2M licensed real estate agents in the U.S., let’s say 10% actively create content. That’s 200,000 potential real estate influencer clients you could build content management systems for.

Any one of those is more than enough to build $1M+ business.

And that‘s just vertically, horizontally, and diagonally. What if we took inspiration from other kinds of mathematical directions? How could you slice to a unique niche by ray, secant, or tangent?

Yeah, a triangle pizza slice works, but isn’t it more fun to have a piece of pizza that‘s sliced like a star, a spiral, a hendecagon or a möbius strip?

Here are some other ideas for slices you can use to make your agency unique:

By buyer psychology

By CEO Enneagram

By employee count

By culture type

By zodiac sign

By geography

By ecosystem

By blood type

By churn rate

By risk profile

By exit intent

By time zone

By maturity

The clearer you are about who you help and what you help them do, the easier it is for you to find the right clients—and for them to find you.

That‘s why the agency that “helps bankrupt mechanics find love” stays in business longer the ones that “make websites.”

—Dan

Positioning by Vertical, Horizontal, and Diagonal