Managing Niches
Define the industries or categories members pick from, and why granularity matters.
Why niches exist
Niche is the single biggest lever you have over match quality. Too broad, and members get paired with people whose work they don't understand well enough to give useful feedback on. Too narrow, and you don't have enough people in any one niche to build reliable parties. Getting the balance right is most of the work of running a good Coterie.
Defining your niches
Set up the niches members choose from during onboarding — these should map to how your actual audience thinks about itself, not an abstract taxonomy. If your community is "B2B marketers," niches like "content marketing," "paid acquisition," and "product marketing" will match better than one broad "marketing" bucket that dumps everyone together.
Start with fewer, broader niches than you think you need. You can always split a niche once you have enough members in it to support two smaller ones — merging an over-fragmented set later is harder.
Competition-exclusion
For niches where members might genuinely be competing for the same clients or audience, you can enable competition-exclusion — it keeps those members out of each other's assignment pool entirely, even though they share a niche. Turn this on for anything where "these two people compete" is a real, common scenario in your community; leave it off where it isn't, since it shrinks the matching pool.
Changing a member's niche
Members pick their niche once, at onboarding, and can't change it themselves — if someone's focus has genuinely shifted, you'll need to update it for them from the admin dashboard.