Chapter 10: What Makes a Tribe Real
I'm not going to pull the wool over your eyes.
Here are the shittest niches on LinkedIn.
These are the ones where you have a near-zero chance of growing your business and you'll almost certainly never make real money.
I'm not saying this to piss you off. I'm saying this out of love. I genuinely cannot stand another LinkedIn dipshit personal brand person who has no idea what they're doing. They only know about views.
They don't know about money. They don't know about conversion. They've never tracked a single dollar from a single post to a single sale, and they're sitting there telling you how to grow.
I'm going to give you the truth.
The 30 shittest niches on LinkedIn:
- Mindset coach
- Business coach (generic)
- Life coach
- Executive coach (generic)
- Leadership coach
- "I help entrepreneurs scale"
- Lead generation for online coaches
- "Helping founders build personal brands"
- Productivity coach
- Career coach (generic)
- Communication coach
- Sales coach (generic)
- Wellness coach
- Confidence coach
- Accountability coach
- Transformation coach
- Growth strategist
- "I help businesses get more clients"
- Marketing consultant (generic)
- Business mentor
- Success coach
- Performance coach (generic)
- Visibility strategist
- LinkedIn expert / LinkedIn coach
- Content strategist (generic)
- Branding consultant (generic)
- Empowerment coach
- Manifestation coach
- High-performance coach
- "I help people find their purpose"
Look at that list. You're on it. I know you are. At least one of those is either your current niche, your old niche, or something you seriously considered calling yourself. And that's fine. That's why you're reading this book.
And look -- I'm technically in this space as well.
I'm a LinkedIn coaching business. Number 24 on that list is literally me.
I'm trying to fight against the dodgiest industry on the planet.
Every day I wake up and compete with people selling LinkedIn growth hacks for $97 who have never closed a deal in their life. So I get it. I'm not standing on some mountain looking down at you.
But I'm not going to lie to your face.
These niches all have one thing in common. They're not tribes. They're labels. They're words you put on a LinkedIn headline because you thought that's what niching means. And here's the science behind why that matters -- why a label will never, ever work the way a real tribe does, no matter how good your content is, no matter how hard you hustle, no matter how many DMs you send.
I Sent Dozens of AI Agents to Research This
I actually sent dozens of AI agents over a couple of weeks to research the science behind why some tribes work and others don't. Not because I'm lazy. Because I wanted to cross-reference academic literature against something nobody else has -- my actual client data.
Here's the thing about my data. I have views AND leads AND money data. LinkedIn doesn't track this. Most LinkedIn coaches can only tell you about impressions. They'll show you a screenshot of a post that got 50,000 views and act like that means something. Cool. How much money did it make? Silence. Every time.
I can tell you which niches generate $45K retainer clients and which generate zero despite 10,000 impressions per post. Because I've coached 2,100+ business owners and we track the whole chain -- content to conversation to call to close. So when I tell you a niche doesn't work, I'm not guessing. I'm reading a spreadsheet.
The AI agents came back with something I already kind of knew from the data, but now I had the scientific backing for it. There are six things -- I call them six rooms -- that determine whether a niche is a real tribe or just a label someone slapped on a LinkedIn headline. And every single one of those 30 shitty niches above fails on most or all of them.
Let me walk you through each room. And for each one, I'm going to give you the actual science, because this isn't opinion. This is how human psychology works at a neurological level.
Room 1: The Language Room
Social Identity Theory -- Tajfel and Turner, 1979 -- found that humans sort themselves into in-groups and out-groups faster than almost any other cognitive process. And the primary way they do it is through language. Not body language. Not clothes. Words. Specific words that act as identity markers.
When a CrossFitter says "Fran" and another CrossFitter's face changes -- that's not vocabulary. That's a neurological shortcut. The brain processes in-group language differently than generic language. It fires recognition before conscious thought catches up. Jargon isn't annoying exclusivity. It's the mechanism through which belonging gets confirmed in real time.
Real tribes have exclusive vocabulary. Words that mean something different inside the tribe than outside it. Or words that mean nothing outside it at all. "WOD." "AMRAP." "Box." "RX." If you know, you know. If you don't, you're not in.
Now ask yourself: what exclusive language does "mindset coach" have? What word can you say to another mindset coach's client that fires recognition before the sentence finishes?
Nothing. Because there's nothing exclusive. "Limiting beliefs." "Growth mindset." "Abundance." Everyone has heard those words. Your mum has heard those words. They're not tribal language. They're motivational posters.
The Language Room is empty. That's strike one.
Room 2: The Front Room -- Entitativity
This is the one that kills most fake niches dead.
Entitativity. Ugly word. Simple concept. It was coined by Donald Campbell in 1958 and expanded by Lickel and his team in 2000. It means: do the people in this group actually perceive themselves as a real, coherent group? Do they say "we"? Can you identify them? Do they share a common fate -- meaning when something happens to the group, every member feels it?
Think about CrossFitters. They absolutely say "we." "We do things differently." "Our box." "Our community." You can identify them -- the callused hands, the Nano shoes, the way they talk about their training like it's a religion. And when something happens to the CrossFit world, every member feels it. That's entitativity. The group is perceived as a real thing that exists. Not a category on a spreadsheet. A thing.
Now think about "online coaches." Do online coaches say "we"? Do they perceive themselves as a bounded group with a shared fate? When something happens in the "online coaching industry," does every online coach feel it in their bones?
No. Because "online coach" isn't a group. It's a tax category. There's no collective identity. There's no shared fate. There's no "we." There are just a bunch of individuals who happen to sell things on the internet and call themselves coaches.
Low entitativity groups don't trigger group-level psychology at all. The brain doesn't even activate the social identity circuits. It just processes each person as an individual. Which means your content, no matter how good it is, cannot fire the "this is my people" response. Because the brain doesn't recognise a people. It just sees a bunch of strangers who share a job description.
Room empty.
Room 3: The Fence -- Shared Enemy
The Robbers Cave experiment. Muzafer Sherif, 1954 -- published 1961. They took a bunch of boys to a summer camp in Oklahoma, split them into two groups, and within days those groups had developed fierce loyalty internally and fierce hostility toward each other. Not because they were different. Because they had a common enemy -- the other group. Out-group derogation increased in-group cohesion. Having something to push against made the group feel more like a group.
This isn't about hatred, right? It's about shared orientation. A tribe that has a clear enemy -- something they collectively oppose, resist, or define themselves against -- is structurally more cohesive than a tribe without one.
CrossFit's enemies are real. Globo gyms. Planet Fitness. The "cardio bunny" approach. The idea that fitness should be easy and comfortable. Every CrossFitter has a visceral reaction to someone saying "I just go on the treadmill for 30 minutes." That's not aggression. That's identity definition. "We're not that."
What's the shared enemy of "marketing consultants"? Bad marketing? That's not an enemy. That's just... the absence of the thing they sell. There's nothing to push against. No identity gets defined. No cohesion gets created.
The Fence is empty.
Room 4: The Foundation -- Initiation Cost
This is one of my favourites because it explains so much about why the dodgiest niches fail.
Aronson and Mills, 1959. Effort Justification. One of the cleanest findings in social psychology. People value things more when they've paid a cost to get them. Not just money -- time, pain, effort, embarrassment, sacrifice. When the cost is high, the brain resolves the cognitive dissonance by deciding: "This must be worth it. I wouldn't have gone through all that for nothing." Festinger figured out the cognitive dissonance part in 1957. Aronson and Mills proved the effort justification effect two years later.
CrossFit costs roughly $400 a month in Australia. The equipment costs hundreds. The physical cost is real -- ripped hands, bruised shins, soreness that makes sitting on the toilet a genuine athletic event. The time cost is real -- 5am sessions, four to five days a week. There's social cost too -- telling your mates you can't come to dinner because you've got the Open this weekend and they look at you like you've joined a cult.
All of that cost creates something: a foundation that's almost impossible to shake. Once you've invested that much, you don't casually leave. You're in. You defend it. You evangelize it. You identify as a CrossFitter, not someone who does CrossFit. The initiation cost built the identity.
Now. What does it cost to become an "online coach"?
Fuck all. You can set up a Calendly link, a Stripe account, and a Canva logo in an afternoon. There's no certification that matters. No physical ordeal. No financial barrier that creates psychological commitment. No time investment that bonds you to the identity.
When the initiation cost is zero, the identity commitment is zero. And when identity commitment is zero, there's no tribe. There's just people who do a thing.
Room empty.
Room 5: The Hearth -- Sacred Values
Philip Tetlock's work on Protected Values in 2003. Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations research. Dan Kahan's Cultural Cognition work. All pointing at the same thing: real tribes have values that are non-negotiable. Not preferences. Not opinions. Sacred values. Things that, if you violate them, you don't get a logical rebuttal -- you get a gut-level response. Something feels wrong. Something is off. You can't articulate why exactly, but you know this person isn't one of us.
CrossFit has sacred values. Don't cherry-pick workouts. Cheer the last person to finish, not just the first. Scale honestly -- don't put RX on the whiteboard if you didn't do the prescribed weight. Show up consistently. Don't talk about how hard it is unless you actually do it.
You know what happens if you walk into a CrossFit box and cherry-pick the fun WODs and skip anything with running? Nobody says anything directly. But you feel it. The way people look at you changes. You're not kicked out. You're just... not really in. That's a sacred value at work. It's not written on a wall. It's felt in the room.
Northern Beaches has sacred values as well. Be casual. Don't overdress. Don't brag about money. Don't be the wanker who turns up to the beach cafe in designer shoes. The penalty for violating these isn't exile -- it's that slightly cold feeling, the invisible wall between you and everyone else who belongs there natively.
What are the sacred values of "business coaching"? What happens if you violate them? Nothing. Because there aren't any. The space is so contaminated with conflicting approaches and dodgy operators that there's no shared moral foundation to violate. Someone can sell a $10K coaching package with zero results and there's no tribal immune response. Nobody gets angry on behalf of the group. Because there is no group.
I'm in this space. I know. I'm fighting against it every day. The online coaching industry has no sacred values because it has no real tribe. And I say that as someone who's technically a member. It's the dodgiest industry on earth and I'm trying to build something real inside it. But I'm not going to pretend the room isn't empty. It is.
Room empty.
Room 6: The Kitchen Counter -- Current Intelligence
This one is about what's happening right now. Not last year. Not in general. Right now.
Terror Management Theory -- Burke and colleagues, 2010 -- showed that shared threats strengthen group bonds. Collective Memory research shows the same pattern: groups that have current shared events -- things that just happened, things that are happening now, things the whole tribe is processing together -- are more psychologically activated than groups whose bonds are purely historical or abstract.
CrossFit in 2024: Lazar Djukic drowned during the swimming event at the CrossFit Games in Fort Worth, Texas. Serbian athlete. Beloved by the community. Died during competition. The entire CrossFit world felt that. Every box had conversations about it. It changed competition safety rules. People cried in gyms on the other side of the world. That's a Kitchen Counter event -- something sitting right there in the tribe's living room that everyone is processing together. It bonded the community tighter. It gave them shared grief, shared anger, shared purpose.
Now think about "online coaches who send emails." What's their Kitchen Counter event? A Mailchimp pricing change? A Substack feature update? An algorithm shift?
Nobody gives a shit. Nobody cried. Nobody hugged their colleague. Nobody said "I can't believe what happened" with genuine emotion in their voice. Because there's nothing on the Kitchen Counter. The room is bare.
Room empty.
Six Rooms. All Empty.
That's why those 30 niches don't work. Not because the people in them are bad at content. Not because they don't hustle hard enough. Not because they need a better funnel or a different DM script or a new profile photo.
They don't work because structurally, psychologically, neurologically -- the thing they're trying to sell into doesn't trigger any of the mechanisms that make human beings feel like they belong to a group. And when there's no group, there's no recognition event. And when there's no recognition event, there's no inbound. There's no "holy shit, that's me." There's just silence. And you're standing in an empty house wondering why nobody's coming to dinner.
Tribe Depth Levels -- The SaaS SDR Zoom
Here's the other thing people get wrong. They think a tribe is a binary. Either it's a tribe or it isn't. But tribes have depth. Levels of zoom. Like looking at a map -- you can see the country, the state, the city, the suburb, the street, the house. And the deeper you zoom, the more real the tribe becomes.
Let me show you what I mean with an example that has nothing to do with fitness.
Level 0: Employee in Australia.
Not a tribe. That's the entire Australian workforce. Millions of people. Zero exclusive language. Zero shared identity beyond "I have a job and I live here." No entitativity. Nobody says "we" about being an Australian employee. It's like saying "oxygen breather." True but meaningless.
Level 1: Employee in sales.
Now there's something. Shared language starts to appear -- quota, pipeline, cold calls, commission. There's a vague culture around sales. Hustle energy. Rejection tolerance. But it's still enormous. Sales reps at Telstra and sales reps at a local real estate agency have almost nothing in common besides the broadest possible job description.
Level 2: Employee in sales at a SaaS company.
Real culture shows up here. Demos. Pipeline stages. Salesforce. Gong recordings. QBRs. Churn meetings. ARR. MRR. Brand debates start: Gong versus Chorus. Salesforce versus HubSpot. Outreach versus Salesloft. There's enough shared vocabulary now that if you walked into a room of SaaS salespeople, you could have a conversation that nobody outside SaaS would follow. That's a tribal signal.
Level 3: SDR at a SaaS company in Australia.
SDR -- Sales Development Representative. The entry-level role. The cold-calling machine. The person doing 50 dials a day, sending 100 emails, booking meetings for the AEs who close the deals and get the bigger commission. There's a real culture here. The SDR grind. The shared suffering of rejection. The specific frustration of booking a meeting that doesn't show up. And in Australia, the SaaS scene is small enough that everyone kind of knows each other. You've been to SaaStr. You follow the same people on LinkedIn. The tribe is getting dense.
Level 4: SDR at an Australian SaaS company, mid-twenties, high performer, wants to become AE but blocked.
THIS is a person. Not a category. A person.
Consistently hitting quota. Knows they're better than half the AE team. Wants the promotion. Manager blocking them -- no open AE spot for 18 months, or worse, the manager favours someone who's been there longer but actually sucks at selling. That person is getting promoted because of tenure, not performance. And our person can't say anything because the whole company operates on the unspoken rule that time served matters more than results.
Making about $110K OTE as an SDR. Knows AE is $150K to $200K OTE. Stuck. Frustrated. Starting to look externally but scared the next company might be worse.
Lives in Sydney. Probably North Shore or CBD apartment. Into fitness -- sales culture in Australia skews active, especially in SaaS. Has done the Bondi to Coogee walk. Been to that Italian restaurant in Bondi that everyone goes to (can't remember the name. Actually wait, it's Totti's lol). Probably hit up the Ivy on George Street when they were 22 and thought that was peak nightlife (Yes, that was me, and sadly not 22 but more like 32 lol).
You feel how specific that is, right?
A career coach writing "I help employees succeed" is competing with Steven Bartlett. Dead on arrival. Bartlett's got millions of followers and better production. You lose every time.
A career coach writing "I help SDRs at Australian SaaS companies who are too good for their current role and their manager knows it" -- nobody else is writing that. Literally nobody. You're the only person standing in that space.
Level 5: Inside their head at 11pm.
They're lying in bed. The room is dark. They've been scrolling LinkedIn for 20 minutes looking at AE job postings.
"I'm going to have to wait two years because my manager gave it to Jake, and Jake's been here three years longer but closes half as much as me. I can't say anything because everyone thinks tenure matters more than performance. I'm going to have to leave. But what if the new company is worse? What if I give up a year of SDR equity and the next place doesn't promote any faster? What if Jake gets promoted while I'm gone and everyone thinks I left because I couldn't cut it?"
That's Level 5. You're not describing their job anymore. You're describing their insomnia.
Level 6: The intimate tribe in their mind.
Partner asking "are you okay?" because they've been quiet since the team meeting where the manager announced Jake's "development plan" for AE transition. Group chat with SDR friends from the last company -- someone sent a meme about managers who promote based on vibes. LinkedIn DM from a recruiter they haven't replied to. Screenshot still sitting in their camera roll.
That's the innermost circle. The relationships that process the frustration. The people they actually talk to about it.
Go back to the Bartlett test from Chapter 7. At Level 0 or 1, you're competing with every generic career coach on the planet. Steven Bartlett could do an episode on "how to get promoted" and he'd eat your lunch. By Level 4 and 5, you're the only one standing there. Bartlett will never write about SDRs at Australian SaaS companies being blocked by tenure-based promotion systems. That's not his world. And that's exactly why you can own it and he never will.
The Six Rooms Comparison -- Physio vs Lead Gen
Now I want to take the six rooms and apply them to two actual niches. Two niches that look structurally similar on paper -- both are service businesses selling to a specific audience on LinkedIn. But one is a real tribe and the other is a hollow label. And the difference explains why one person gets inbound every week and the other gets nothing despite doing all the same work.
Niche A: A physiotherapist selling to CrossFit dads on the Northern Beaches who recently had a baby.
Niche B: Someone selling lead generation to online coaches who send emails.
Let's walk through every room.
Room 1: Language
Physio for CrossFit dads on the Northern Beaches who just had a baby.
Three tribes stacked. Three completely different language worlds, all converging on one person.
CrossFit language: WOD, Fran, EMOM, AMRAP, box, RX, scaling, whiteboard, metcon, snatch, clean and jerk. Northern Beaches language: B-Line bus, Pittwater Road, North Narra, Dee Why, the Corso, "just going for a dip," barefoot at the shops. New dad language: control crying, month three, sleep regression, witching hour, "she's cluster feeding," that sleep consultant everyone shares on Instagram.
But here's where it gets sick. The intersection language. The words that only exist because these three tribes overlap in one person:
"5am WOD hits different when you've been up since 2am with a screaming baby."
"Shoulder mobility is fucked from holding a newborn for six hours."
"Haven't done a proper session in three weeks. Walked into the box at North Narra and everyone asked where I'd been."
Those sentences don't exist in any one tribe. They exist in the overlap. And that overlap is where recognition goes from "that's relevant" to "are you watching my fucking life?"
Lead gen for online coaches who send emails.
Stripe. GoHighLevel. Opt-in rates. Cold email. Deliverability. Open rates.
Every marketer on the planet uses these words. There's nothing exclusive. A crypto bro sending spam, a SaaS company running outbound, a real estate agent doing email blasts -- they all use the same vocabulary. There are zero words in this space that fire recognition for a specific group.
Room: FULL for the physio. EMPTY for lead gen.
Room 2: Front Room -- Entitativity
Physio niche. CrossFitters absolutely say "we." Parents absolutely say "we." Northern Beaches people -- well, they don't say "we" out loud because that would be too much and it would violate the sacred value of being casual -- but they sure as hell feel it. You can identify CrossFitters. You can identify new dads. And when something happens to CrossFit or to parents on the Northern Beaches, every member of those overlapping groups feels it. High entitativity across all three stacked tribes.
Lead gen niche. Do "online coaches who send emails" say "we"? Do they perceive themselves as a bounded group? Is there any shared fate? If Mailchimp shut down tomorrow, would online coaches band together in solidarity? Would there be candlelight vigils?
No. There'd be a Twitter thread and everyone would switch to ConvertKit by Tuesday. No shared identity. No collective "we." No entitativity.
Room: FULL for the physio. EMPTY for lead gen.
Room 3: The Fence -- Shared Enemy
Physio niche. Mate. The enemies here are visceral. Becoming a fat dad. Losing your identity to parenthood. The globo gym guys who think CrossFit is a cult. The guilt of choosing the 5am session over sleep when the baby was up all night. The slow creep of "I used to be fit." The voice that says "just take a break" when what it really means is "just give up."
Those enemies are real. They're emotional. They create cohesion because every CrossFit dad on the Northern Beaches is fighting the same battle -- staying who they were while becoming who they need to be for their kid.
Lead gen niche. What's the shared enemy? Bad deliverability? Emails going to spam? That's a technical problem, not a tribal enemy. Nobody bonds over deliverability issues. Nobody says "we're fighting the good fight against spam filters" with passion in their voice. There's no emotional charge. No shared orientation.
Room: FULL for the physio. EMPTY for lead gen.
Room 4: The Foundation -- Initiation Cost
Physio niche. CrossFit: roughly $400 a month. Equipment: hundreds of dollars. Physical cost: torn hands, bruised shins, soreness that makes you walk funny for two days. Time cost: 5am sessions, four or five days a week, for years. Northern Beaches cost: one of the most expensive areas in Sydney to live. You're paying a premium just to exist there. And parenthood? The biggest initiation cost of all. Nine months of pregnancy, birth, sleepless nights, your entire life restructured around another human. You don't casually become a parent and then casually leave.
The Foundation is built from concrete, steel, and sleep deprivation.
Lead gen niche. What does it cost to become an online coach? Nothing. A Mailchimp free tier. A Canva account. A laptop and wifi. There's no certification that matters. No physical ordeal. No financial barrier. You could be an "online coach" by tomorrow morning without sacrificing a single thing.
Zero cost. Zero foundation.
Room: FULL for the physio. EMPTY for lead gen.
Room 5: The Hearth -- Sacred Values
Physio niche. CrossFit values: don't cherry-pick workouts. Cheer the last person. Scale honestly. Show up when it's hard. Never talk down another CrossFitter's effort.
Northern Beaches values: be casual. Don't be a wanker. Don't overdress. Don't brag. Be in the water. Be outside.
New dad values: be present. Be hands-on. Don't be the dad who "babysits" his own kid. Share the load. Be there for the 2am wake-up, not just the fun parts.
Cultural penalty for violation: mention "treadmill cardio" in a CrossFit box and watch the temperature drop. Show up to the Northern Beaches in designer loafers and watch people not talk to you. Be the dad who's never at the park and watch the other dads stop inviting you to things.
These sacred values aren't written anywhere. You can't Google them. You can only feel them because you've been inside long enough to absorb them. That's what Tetlock's work on Protected Values shows -- they can't be researched. They can only be experienced. Breaking them doesn't produce a clear logical error. It produces "something is off." And that "something is off" feeling is enough to kill trust before a single word of your content gets processed.
Lead gen niche. What are the sacred values of online coaching? What happens if you violate them? Nothing. Because the space is so contaminated -- I'm saying this as someone in it -- that there's no shared moral baseline. Someone can sell a $15K program with zero results and nobody gets angry on behalf of the group. Because there is no group. There's no shared sense of "we don't do that here." There's no cultural immune response. It's the Wild West and I'm technically a cowboy in it, which is kind of embarrassing but at least I'm honest about it.
Room: FULL for the physio. EMPTY for lead gen.
Room 6: Kitchen Counter -- Current Intelligence
Physio niche. Lazar Djukic drowning at the 2024 CrossFit Games. Everyone in CrossFit felt that. Serbian athlete, died during the swimming event in Fort Worth, Texas. Boxes around the world had conversations about safety, about competition, about what the sport owes its athletes. Northern Beaches news -- council changes, beach closures, that restaurant that shut down, the new development everyone hates. Parenting news -- the latest safe sleep guidelines, the childcare subsidy changes, that podcast episode about postpartum anxiety that everyone's sharing.
The Kitchen Counter is overflowing. There's always something current to talk about, something the whole tribe is processing right now.
Lead gen niche. A Mailchimp pricing change? A GoHighLevel update? An algorithm shift?
Nobody cares. Nobody bonds over it. Nobody calls their mate and says "did you hear about the new Mailchimp tier pricing?" with genuine emotion. There's nothing current and nothing shared. Bare counter. Nothing on it.
Room: FULL for the physio. EMPTY for lead gen.
The Verdict
Physio for CrossFit dads on the Northern Beaches who recently had a baby: six rooms filled. All six. That's a real tribe. That's tribal density so high that content practically writes itself, because there's so much shared language, shared experience, shared values, and shared current events that every post you write lands like a conversation the reader was already having in their own head.
Lead generation for online coaches who send emails: six rooms empty. Every single one. That's not a tribe. That's a label.
And here's the thing that nobody wants to hear.
You cannot content your way, DM your way, or funnel your way into making a label work. It's structurally impossible. You're not fighting a marketing problem. You're fighting a physics problem. The mechanisms that create group-level psychology -- the entitativity, the shared enemy, the initiation cost, the sacred values -- they either exist in the niche or they don't. And no amount of hustle can manufacture them from nothing.
If your niche fills fewer than three rooms -- stop. Don't write another post. Don't send another DM. Go back to Chapter 3 and find a real tribe. I'm dead serious. The single biggest waste of time on LinkedIn is creating excellent content for a niche that isn't a tribe. Because excellent content inside an empty house is still just fucking noise.
The Other Mechanisms
The six rooms are the gateway. But real tribes have more than six things going on. They have layers of infrastructure that make the group denser, stickier, harder to leave, and easier to sell into. I want to run through these quickly because they matter, and because when you see them stacked on top of the six rooms, you start to understand why some niches are just unfairly good.
Identity Fusion. In a real tribe, people don't just DO the thing. They ARE the thing. CrossFitters don't "do CrossFit." They ARE CrossFitters. That's a psychologically different state. When you fuse with a group identity, you defend it like you'd defend yourself. Because it is yourself. "Online coaches" don't fuse with anything. It's a job description, not an identity.
Status Hierarchy. Real tribes have ways of knowing who's at the top. CrossFit has Fran times, competition results, who qualified for the Open, who went to Regionals. There's a clear pecking order and everyone knows where they sit in it. "Online coaching" has no status hierarchy that anyone respects. Having a lot of followers doesn't count -- everyone knows you can buy those.
Rituals and Calendar. The CrossFit Open. Friday Night Lights. Murph on Memorial Day. These aren't random events. They're rituals. They mark time. They give the tribe a shared calendar that creates anticipation, shared experience, and collective memory. "Online coaching" has no rituals. There's no shared calendar event that every online coach participates in and talks about afterwards.
Collective Memory. Lazar Djukic. The 2020 home WODs during COVID when every CrossFitter was filming themselves doing burpees in their garage. The Rich Froning era. Mat Fraser's dominance. These events live in the tribe's shared memory. They're reference points. They give depth to the group's identity over time. "Online coaching" has no collective memory worth a damn.
Material Culture. Nano lifters. Rogue barbells. The whiteboard. NOBULL shoes. Wrist wraps. The specific brand of chalk you use. These objects carry meaning beyond their function. They're identity signals. Wearing NOBULL shoes to a CrossFit box says something about you. Using a Rogue barbell feels different than using a generic one -- not because the steel is necessarily better, but because the brand is tribal. It's like wearing the jersey.
Shared Suffering. The soreness after a hero WOD. The early mornings when it's still dark and cold and you're questioning your life choices in the car park. The ice baths. The first three months of a newborn's life where you don't sleep and you don't complain because you chose this. Shared suffering bonds people at a level that shared success never quite reaches. You remember who was in the trenches with you.
Reputation Economy. In CrossFit, reputation is built by showing up consistently and destroyed by ego lifting or sandbagging. Everyone knows who's there every day and who shows up once a month when it's convenient. That kind of social accountability doesn't exist in "online coaching" -- you can disappear for six months and come back with a completely new brand and nobody bats an eye.
Competition. Whiteboard scores. Open rankings. Local throwdowns. Healthy competition within the tribe creates engagement, creates content, creates status, creates reasons to keep showing up and keep getting better.
The Niche Scoring Bible scores all 25 mechanisms. The six rooms are the gateway -- the Tier 1 mechanisms that determine whether the tribe is real enough to score at all. If the six rooms are empty, scoring the other 19 is a waste of your time. It's like inspecting the plumbing in a house that has no walls. Fix the structure first. Then worry about the details.
Carrier Trust -- The Person at the Door
So you've found a tribe. The six rooms are full. The mechanisms are real. The density is there. Great.
Who's delivering the message?
Because here's the thing that nobody wants to talk about. The best person to sell physiotherapy to CrossFit dads on the Northern Beaches who recently had a baby is a physio who IS a CrossFit dad on the Northern Beaches who recently had a baby.
You don't HAVE to be. But it helps. Massively.
Every time a tribe member encounters your content, they're running a background check. Not consciously. Not deliberately. But their brain is asking: "Is this person one of us?" And if the answer is yes -- if you've got the calluses, the sleep deprivation, the box membership, the knowledge of what Pittwater Road looks like at 5am when it's still dark and you're driving to the box with your eyes half-closed -- then the trust comes faster. Because you've done the initiation. You've paid the cost. You have the scars. And scars are the ultimate carrier trust signal.
This is the K in the RT formula from Chapter 1. RT = I x L x C x K. Identity Match times Language Match times Cultural Match times Carrier Trust. All multiplicative. If any factor is zero, the whole thing collapses. And Carrier Trust -- the K -- is the one most people ignore because it's the hardest to fake and the hardest to build from scratch.
Btw, I have another book coming soon covering the entire formula. Stay tuned, legend)
If you're not already inside the tribe, you can become one. Join the box. Show up at 5am. Do the work. Buy the shoes. Have the conversations. Rip your hands. Learn the language by living in it, not by Googling it. That's what I mean when I say "do the free work." Immerse yourself in the tribe before you try to sell to it. It takes time. It costs money. It might hurt. That's kind of the point -- remember Room 4? The initiation cost is what makes the identity real.
But here's what you cannot do. You cannot sell from the outside without ever talking to anyone on the inside. And there are people trying this on LinkedIn right now. Heaps of them. They've never had a single conversation with their target market. Never been in the room. Never attended the event. Never experienced the pain. And it's obvious. It's so fucking obvious. The tribe can smell it. They can't always tell you exactly what's wrong -- but something is off. The words are technically right but the usage isn't native. The references are correct but the feeling is wrong. And when a tribe member detects someone performing insider status they haven't earned, the trust damage is worse than if they'd never tried at all.
And I have to be honest about something else as well. Some people don't have the right to sell into a tribe because they've never been inside it and they actually suck at what they do. That's not a positioning problem. That's not a niche problem. That's a competence problem. And no amount of tribal alignment fixes incompetence. If you can't actually help the person, finding the right tribe just means you'll damage more people's trust more efficiently. I'd rather you sell into the wrong niche with genuine skill than sell into the right niche with nothing behind it.
But if you're good at what you do -- genuinely good, tested it, proven it, got the results to back it up -- and you find a real tribe, and you either belong to it or you do the work to earn your way in? That's when everything clicks. That's when the content writes itself because you're not performing insight, you're reporting from inside the world. You're not guessing what they care about. You know. Because you care about it too.
That's the difference between being a salesperson and being a member who happens to sell.
What Happens Next
You know the six rooms now. You know what makes a tribe real and what makes it a label. You know why those 30 shitty niches don't work and you know the science behind every room. You know how tribes have depth levels, and you've seen the difference between a niche with six full rooms and one with six empty rooms.
The next chapter is about building your Tribe Dossier. You're going to take the six rooms and extract everything -- the language, the objects, the rituals, the pain, the sacred values, the enemies, the Kitchen Counter items -- and put it all in one document. One of my clients did exactly this. Built a complete dossier -- 16 pages of tribal intelligence. I'm going to show you exactly what it looked like, room by room, and how it changed his content overnight.
Every room you couldn't fill? That's a DM to send. That's a conversation to have. That's a community to join, an event to attend, a person to talk to. The empty rooms aren't failures -- they're instructions. They're telling you exactly where to go and what to do before you write another word.
Six rooms full, you've got a tribe.
Six rooms empty, you've got a label.
Go figure out which one you have.
Next: Chapter Eleven -- Build Your Tribe Dossier