Niche and target selection

Apply ../00-lead-generation-guardrails/SKILL.md first. Every step this skill defines must still resolve channel, relationship, and jurisdiction against that skill's compliance matrix before touching a real recipient, list, or send — this skill decides who to target, not whether a specific send is legal.

What niche selection means in this pack

This pack is B2B-only. A "niche" here is a specific vertical or role-based segment of businesses (e.g. "commercial HVAC contractors," "boutique law firms doing personal injury intake," "regional freight brokers"), not a consumer demographic. Every downstream skill — list building (03), copywriting (05), campaign launch (06) — assumes the niche and target profile chosen here are already fixed before that skill's own work starts. Getting this step wrong is expensive to unwind: a mis-targeted list burns sending-domain reputation and agency credibility before anyone finds out the niche didn't convert.

The ICP band: $1M–$20M revenue, 5–50 employees

Absent a client- or requester-supplied ICP that already specifies different bounds, default to targeting businesses with:

• Annual revenue: $1M–$20M/yr
• Headcount: 5–50 employees

This band is a heuristic carried over from this pack's source material, referred to there as the "golden goose" profile. Treat it as a starting filter to apply and then validate against the specific niche under consideration, not as a hard law that overrides evidence from the niche itself.

Why this band works (practitioner judgment, not verified fact)

This reasoning is practitioner judgment, not an independently verified fact. No regulator, census bureau, or peer-reviewed source is cited here because none of the claims below — or elsewhere in this skill's criteria, validation, and halt-condition sections — are the kind of thing such a source verifies; they are working assumptions common in B2B services and agency practice, carried forward from this pack's source material without independent re-verification. This label applies to every commercial or behavioral claim in this skill, not only the three bullets immediately below — a claim stated as fact anywhere else in this file should be read under the same practitioner-judgment caveat unless it cites a real source. Treat the reasoning as a lens for evaluating a candidate niche, not as ground truth to quote back to a client as fact.