Expand Your Audience by Niching Down: Lessons from MeetEdgar GM Lacey Sheardown

If you operate within the world of SaaS, you may have experienced this familiar inclination: when competitors add features, you immediately feel the pressure to do so as well. That compulsion to pack out your SaaS app can easily snowball into a roadmap full of tools and features that have been added reactively rather than strategically.

Our social media scheduling and automation platform, MeetEdgar, found itself in that exact position over the last few seasons. Originally designed in 2014 for solopreneurs, freelancers, and small business owners, MeetEdgar has been known for helping one-stop-shop entrepreneurs schedule their social media content quickly, allowing them to focus on running their business. The platform allows users to organize content into themed categories, schedule posts across multiple social media platforms from one dashboard, and set evergreen content to recycle automatically, so that key messages continue to reach new audiences without requiring constant attention.

As the social media management space expanded and grew more feature-heavy, the MeetEdgar team found themselves attracting a wider, more enterprise-focused audience, leaving them to debate whether their product should follow suit. 

In this article, we sit down with MeetEdgar General Manager Lacey Sheardown to talk through how MeetEdgar weighed that decision, what ultimately led the team to double down on the audience they knew best, and what that shift has meant for the product and its growth. 

Table of Contents

• Lesson 1: Know Who You're Building For
• Lesson 2: Every Feature Decision Signals Who It’s For
• Lesson 3: Narrow Your Focus to Grow Your Audience
• Lesson 4: Your Most Loyal Users Are Your Most Valuable Resource
• What’s Next for MeetEdgar
• Conclusion

Lesson #1: The clearer you get about who you're building for, the easier every product decision becomes.

For MeetEdgar, the move away from its core audience occurred slowly, showing up in an accumulation of small signs rather than in one big moment.

"So many of the competitors in our space are huge, designed for massive marketing teams and big enterprise companies," Lacey explains. "MeetEdgar was never that. It was created by a working mom for solo entrepreneurs who needed something different from what the market was offering."

MeetEdgar's typical user isn't a social media manager. They're a landscaper, a hair stylist, a business coach—someone who excels at what they do and wants to stay visible online without devoting hours to the task.

Still, when enterprise users began showing interest in the platform, the team felt pressured to expand the product to suit them. But during free trials, those same users would consistently leave without converting after testing the platform. The reason was simple: the application's collaboration tools and analytics just weren't designed to fit the needs of a large-scale corporate team. The team found themselves at a crossroads: expand the feature set to compete for enterprise clients, or stay the course for the audience MeetEdgar was created for?

For Sheardown, the answer was obvious. "Although we’d be missing out on some business, we realized it wasn't our core business. Those users shouldn't be with us, and there are already plenty of products in the marketplace to serve them."

After the decision was made, the team realized that the messaging on MeetEdgar's homepage was attempting to be everything to everyone, rather than simply targeting the solopreneurs and small business owners the platform was designed for. They quickly shifted their SEO strategy back to their true audience, and trial conversions began to rise once again.

Lesson #2: Every feature decision makes a statement about who your product is for.

For MeetEdgar, some of the clearest product direction has come from watching how users actually behave in the platform. When the team rebuilt their Content Composer feature two years prior, they kept the original version available alongside the new one. To their surprise, users overwhelmingly stuck with the old version.

"The previous one was really simple, really an all-in-one-screen, which made it a lot easier for people to use," explains Sheardown. "Just based on customer behaviour, we found that users preferred the old composer. They want to get in and out, with content loaded into their categories and the automation, so they can set it and forget it. A more involved process just isn't what they're looking for."

The evaluation process for any new feature came down to one question: will this add value for a solopreneur, or will it distract from what they actually came to do? "The bottom line with our audience is always: is it helpful?" says Sheardown. "They don't need graphs and reports on things they're never going to look at or use."

That standard now motivates every roadmap decision: will this make life easier for a one-person operation?

Adding an integration for YouTube Shorts was an easy call. MeetEdgar users were already creating short-form video for Instagram Reels and TikTok from within the platform, and YouTube Shorts was a natural addition for the format. “We've been increasingly getting requests from users to add YouTube Shorts," says Sheardown. "YouTube is literally one of the largest search engines in the world. Once you've created a Reel or TikTok, those videos can be reused for Shorts. That's one of the wonderful things about Edgar: you come to one dashboard and can publish your content across a variety of platforms. It just made sense that YouTube Shorts was the next one we expanded to.”

You can learn more about MeetEdgar's YouTube Shorts integration here.

The team applied the same mindset to the app's calendar feature, making UX updates designed for a time-strapped solopreneur. The new calendar gives users a clearer picture of their upcoming content, making it easier to find any gaps in the schedule and plan ahead. 

The result is a product that continues to develop without losing sight of the client it was created for.

Lesson #3: Narrowing your focus is one of the most effective ways to grow your audience.

After recommitting to their specific audience, the team also saw a notable leap in their search engine visibility.

"We already have domain authority and a legacy with the search engines," says Sheardown. "We've been producing content for over ten years that we regularly update. That's something a lot of people just can't replicate until they've been online longer." Getting more intentional about who that content was for was the simple shift they needed to start seeing stronger SEO and GEO performance across the board. 

The team also completed a full website overhaul in 2025, tightening up site architecture and making sure the website's copy targeted the right audience. The homepage now opens with language that speaks directly to busy entrepreneurs, freelancers, small teams, and content creators. As Sheardown puts it, "If you’re a large agency or a major enterprise organization, you're going to know this isn't speaking to you. We did that purposefully." 

This, alongside an updated backlink-building strategy, led to some compelling SEO data results. Compared to the previous year, MeetEdgar saw organic impressions grow by nearly 500%, with an organic search increase of over 20%. The team has also seen strong growth in the number of keywords ranking in the top ten, including within AI-powered search results, where user search behaviour has been shifting steadily.

For a platform that’s been around since 2014, these numbers suggest that consistency and audience focus may be a more reliable growth strategy than following competitors trends.

Lesson #4: Your most loyal users are your most valuable resource.

MeetEdgar brings that same consistency to how it maintains relationships with its user base. Over time, a group of long-term users has become one of the team's most reliable sources of product direction.

"We have a core group that I call our power users," says Sheardown. "They've naturally moved from being community members to advocates who are truly invested in our product. They want us to succeed, because our success is their success."

When the team has a feature idea worth pressure-testing, that group is the first call. "We make sure that when something has been implemented, the person who suggested it knows their idea came to life," says Sheardown. "And we thank them for that."

After more than a decade, that relationship between product and user is still one of the things MeetEdgar does best.

Staying the Course: What's Next for MeetEdgar?

A few notable additions are coming to MeetEdgar in the near future. Among them is an expanded Canva integration. MeetEdgar users have been able to export designs from Canva straight into their content library for a while, but the new integration takes that a step further. When creating a post inside MeetEdgar, users will be able to pull a saved Canva design directly into the content screen. For a solopreneur who already does their design work in Canva, it removes one more step from the publishing process. "It'll be a very simple integration," shares Sheardown. "Not a big learning curve."

The second is integration support for Bluesky, the social platform that has grown to over 40 million users since its public debut two years ago. Though still a fraction of the size of Threads or X, it has an engaged and growing user base, and a portion of MeetEdgar's audience has already been gravitating toward it. For those users, managing one more platform from the same dashboard they already use makes perfect sense.

Both additions are modest by design, and that’s exactly the point.

Conclusion

Getting honest about who you're building for tends to make everything else easier to figure out.

For MeetEdgar, that has translated into stronger search visibility, a more engaged user base, and a product that continues to earn the loyalty of the people it was created for. The work of recommitting to their original audience and serving them well has paid off in ways that chasing a broader one never did.

The lessons are transferable. Knowing your audience makes product decisions easier. Listening to how users actually behave in your platform tells you more than any feature request list. And saying no to the wrong additions tends to make room for the right ones.

Ask Sheardown what MeetEdgar’s ultimate goal is for its users, and the answer is refreshingly uncomplicated. “Our users aren't trying to chase going viral,” she says. “They just want to show up consistently for their community, and that's what we help them do.”

Growth, it turns out, doesn’t always require more. Sometimes it just requires knowing exactly who you're growing for.

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