Niche Down or Not? What to Do When You Have Too Many Interests

TL;DR: Niche-down advice helps for the first few months and hurts as a permanent rule. If you have too many interests, pick a lens instead of a topic, keep the weird stuff in, and let the category show up on its own.

I did the playbook once. Pick a niche, build authority, set up content pillars, build a funnel. The writing came out fine. It also came out like anybody could have written it, and fine is exactly what a chatbot spits out for free now.

So here’s what I did instead, what the advice gets right, and how to figure out which way you go.

Should you niche down if you have too many interests?

Not forever. Narrow focus helps when you’re starting from zero, because a stranger needs to get what you do in one glance. It stops helping the minute it makes you cut the parts of you that made the work worth reading.

Some framework told me to pick a lane, so I wrote about “operations for creators.” It was competent and dead. No blood in it, no weird, no me.

I threw out the content calendar and the pillar strategy and started writing whatever I wanted. One week was chaos magic, the next was Japanese philosophy. Then a cosmic horror novella, guerrilla gardening in an apartment, Gnostic theology, a rant about the VA, fermentation. There was no funnel and no brand plan, just too many interests and a Substack account. Easily the best call I ever made.

Why does niche-down advice keep getting repeated?

Because a creator in a box is easy to sell to. Whoever is handing out the advice gets as much out of it as you do, usually more.

Narrow yourself because somebody said so and you turn into a predictable slot in their marketing. Then the next thing they sell you is the course on how to win in the lane they picked for you.

The advice isn’t all garbage, though. Focus helps. So does knowing who you’re talking to. My problem is with the part where you saw off whatever doesn’t fit the template. And most of what you’ll read on this, either direction, is one creator’s story dressed up as proof. Mine included.

What is a “niche of one”?

A niche of one means your work defines the category instead of a category defining your work. It’s built out of what you’ve lived through, what you’ve learned, and the stuff you can’t stop chewing on.

Here’s my pile:

• Twelve years in the Air Force
• 8.5 years in Okinawa
• Deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan
• A decade of chaos magic practice
• A doctorate in Metaphysics
• Jobs at Google, GoDaddy and CBRE, plus construction work and manual labor
• A Cuban wife
• Combat trauma
• A brain that keeps connecting things that aren’t supposed to connect

Your pile looks nothing like that, and it shouldn’t. Somebody who’s studied enough unrelated stuff starts seeing the same structures underneath all of it. Nobody can copy that off you, because they’d need your life to do it.

How do you pick what to write when there is no niche?

Keep a master list and write whichever item has its teeth in you that week. Mine runs to several hundred topics, and there’s no editorial calendar deciding what comes next. The weekly newsletter might do quantum consciousness one Sunday, sourdough the next, and what combat PTSD actually feels like the Sunday after.

People will call that suicide. You’ll hear that you can’t grow without consistency and can’t make money without a niche. From the outside it looks like a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing. It isn’t random, though. Every pick comes out of a lifetime of specific experience, and no content strategist could build that list for you.

If “whatever grabs me” is too loose for you, use a lens. Your subject changes every week and your way of looking at it stays put. Mine is hunting for the pattern that runs across fields. Yours might be a question you keep asking or a fight you keep picking. Let the topics move around under it.

Does AI change the niche question?

Yes, and it pushes toward being more specific. Competent generic writing costs almost nothing to produce now, so the generic take on your topic has more competition than ever. What a model doesn’t have is your life.

And if you make things with AI, I want you here. Your niche of one includes how you work with it: what you ask, what you toss, what you refuse to put your name on. A person and a model chewing on something odd and specific is still a spot nobody else is standing in.

The trap is the same for everybody, human or otherwise. Writing that could have come from anyone, about anything, for nobody.

What actually works if you try this?

I don’t have a system. I’ve got a handful of habits that held up.

• Make things. Essays, stories, guides, radio, zines, whatever your brain wants to build. Put it out and watch what happens.
• Treat what lands as data. When something connects, notice it. Don’t build a cage out of it. A lot of what gets called strategy is just self-censorship with a spreadsheet.
• Quit asking permission. You don’t need a credential to write about consciousness or an MBA to talk about operations. The internet doesn’t have a bouncer.
• Expect misses. I’ve written pieces I loved that sank without a ripple, and pieces I thought were mediocre that people were still sharing months later. You can’t call it ahead of time.
• Keep overhead low and expectations honest. I’m building a body of work. The revenue target is modest on purpose. Once the money becomes the point, the work starts to rot, and readers can tell.
• Go looking for your people. A follower count is a number. Your people are the ones hungry for the same weird, honest digging you are.

On platforms: renting space on someone else’s is a fine way to get seen early. Use the reach, but keep your work portable and build a place of your own to put it, so an algorithm change can’t take it from you.

Frequently asked questions

What does “niche down” mean?

Niching down means narrowing your work to one topic for one audience so people can tell right away what you offer. It’s standard advice for new creators and freelancers because it makes you easy to explain early on.

Can a newsletter work without a single niche?

Yes. A newsletter can hold together around a voice, a lens, or a set of questions instead of one subject, and readers who like how you think will follow you from topic to topic. Expect slower growth at the start.

How do I know if I should niche down or stay broad?

Run the narrow version for a few months and look hard at the work. If the writing goes flat and you dread the topic, the niche is costing you more than it pays. If you’re fired up and readers are responding, keep going. You can change your mind later either way.

What is a lens, and how is it different from a niche?

A niche is a topic. A lens is a way of looking that carries from one topic to the next, like spotting hidden structure, poking holes in official stories, or dragging old ideas into practical use. Readers get something consistent and you still get to write about anything.

Does AI make a niche of one more or less important?

More. Anyone can generate competent generic writing now, so the edge left is the specific, lived, odd material that only comes from you. That’s true whether you work alone or with an AI.

How do I find my own raw material?

Write down what you’ve lived through, the skills you’ve picked up, and the subjects you can’t stop reading about. Then look for the pairs that don’t belong together. Your best work usually sits where two of them overlap.

Nobody needs another widget, and if you’re still reading this, you already knew that.