Should I Niche Down? I Built the Funnel, Then Quit It

TL;DR: Niching down and building the funnel worked for me. It also made me hate writing. I went back to writing about everything I care about, took a smaller audience and smaller revenue, and got readers who actually read.

It was 2 AM and I had a half-done post open called “5 Systems Every Creator Needs to Scale.” I sat there and figured out I fucking hated it.

The writing was never the problem. I’ve loved that since I was a kid swiping my mom’s typewriter for bad science fiction. The problem was the job I’d built around it.

Does the niche-down playbook actually work?

Yeah, it works. That’s what makes it hard to walk away from.

I took the advice. Picked “creator business” as my lane. Cleaned up my language, cut the weird tangents, dropped every topic that didn’t fit. Then I built all of it: a newsletter, lead magnets, sales funnels, a content calendar, email sequences.

And people signed up. People bought stuff. I made decent money and every chart pointed the right way.

So I’m not going to tell you the tactics are garbage. For a repeatable business around one topic, the machine does what it says. But when the machine is paying you, you’ve got no reason to ask whether you still want to run it.

What did niching down cost me?

Pretty much everything that made my stuff worth reading.

• The swearing. Gone, because the funnel crowd says profanity doesn’t convert.
• The range. My head runs combat psychology into quantum mechanics, Japanese philosophy into chaos magic, Gnostic theology into platform economics. All of that went in the off-brand pile.
• The actual work. I was making content about making things instead of making things. Passing along frameworks I got from people who got them from somebody else. Photocopy a photocopy enough times and you can’t read it anymore.
• Belief. I was outlining a course on building a creator business and realized I didn’t buy a word of it. The tactics held up fine. The goal they served was the wrong one.

I could see where it went from there. Six figures. A team cranking out posts I didn’t care about. Automation running on nothing. One more guy in the echo chamber selling other people the blueprints for their own.

Why does a scattered brain matter here?

Because the scattered part was the asset, and I let a marketing template talk me out of it.

I did 12 years in the military, 8.5 of them in Japan, and came out with all those fields crossed up in my head. As a kid I’d rather sit inside reading the old encyclopedia set we had. Same habit, bigger shelf.

I started writing about all of it because keeping it in felt worse. Then the niche advice told me that was a liability, and I believed it.

If you’ve got a pile of unrelated obsessions, that’s the assumption I’d poke at first. The advice expects you to have one thing. A lot of us don’t.

What changed when I quit the funnel?

I quit trying to be marketable. I wrote about whatever grabbed me that week. The cussing came back, the dark jokes came back, the long sideways rambles came back. I pictured one strange reader across the table and wrote to that person, not to a demographic.

By any guru scorecard it’s a downgrade. Fewer subscribers. Less money.

What the other side looks like:

• I want to write when I get up. I used to dread it.
• People open what I send to read it, not to grab a freebie and bail.
• The comments are people actually talking to me.

Niche of One came out of that switch. It’s where all the stuff that didn’t fit the lane ended up.

Is “niche down” still good advice in 2026?

It’s still the default, and it’s still only half right. Most creator advice this year still says pick a lane, with a few people arguing you should explore before you narrow or go broad for reach first.

What changed is the price of generic. Anybody can get a clean, on-topic post about productivity systems out of an AI tool in a minute. So “competent and on-topic” doesn’t set you apart from anybody. If you make things with AI, you’re exactly who I want reading this: the tool handles speed, and the weird stuff only you know is what nobody else can copy. What nobody can generate is your particular mess of experience and opinions. Narrow the audience to people who want that, not the topic to whatever converts.

If you want to check yourself:

1. Write down what you’d cover if nobody could see your numbers.
2. Compare it to what you published last month.
3. Small overlap means you’re running somebody else’s plan.
4. Change one thing, your voice or your subject, and see who sticks around.

Is wanting to scale wrong?

No. I’m probably never building a team or selling a course to thousands of people, and I’m fine with that. If you want that, go get it. The playbook will help.

Could I just be telling myself a nice story about failing? Sure, maybe. I don’t buy it. Doing it the approved way showed me one thing real clearly, and it was that I was losing the reason I started.

Frequently asked questions

Should I niche down as a new creator?

Pick a topic narrow enough that a stranger can tell what you write about, and make it one you’d keep writing about for free. Pick it because it converts and expect it to stop feeling like yours.

Can you make money without a tight niche?

Yes, but it’s usually slower and smaller. I made more money when I was cleaned up and focused. I make less now and picked this anyway. Figure out which trade you want before you build anything.

Do lead magnets and funnels still work?

They worked for me. People subscribed and products sold. The catch was a lot of those subscribers came for the free thing and never read what came after, and no funnel fixes that.

How do I know if I’m following someone else’s playbook?

Look at what you published in the last month. Wouldn’t read it yourself, or barely remember writing it? There’s your answer.

Is it okay to write about unrelated topics on one site?

Yes. People follow a voice more than a topic list. Keep the voice steady and a reader will go from chaos magic to platform economics with you.

I never stopped writing. I stopped doing it the way I was told to.