The case for not niching down

I keep running into the same problem over and over…I’m struggling to distill myself into a niche.

A niche would be something like “The AI Guy” or “The Healthy Food Guy”… essentially paring down my content to just a single topic or category that I can become known for.

The conventional wisdom is that by niching down into a single topic, your content will be more focused, your audience will be more focused, and it will be easier to find content-audience fit.

A tighter content-audience fit means a quicker path to product-audience fit.

This makes sense.

But by nature, I have several different interests and get bored when I constrain my natural curiosity.

I love tech and business strategy, but also I love brands and products. I also enjoy diving into wellness, sports and music.

My content thus far has crossed into all of those areas and my personal brand is nicheless.

I often say that niches are n=1 and that a creator’s unique intersection of topics and interests is the niche.

I always thought that niches were more like a fingerprint than an archetype…they should be unique to everyone.

But the advice I consistently get is that I should niche down because it’s hard for people to quickly understand why they should follow me.

When I get this advice, I spend a lot of time working and reworking my social bios, trying to distill the best one-liner for what I do.

I can’t figure it out.

I keep telling myself it’s bad that I’m not able to decide on a niche…but maybe it isn’t.

Let’s invert.

Why could it be better to not have a niche?

Well for one thing, when someone is tied to a niche, their identity (as a person) get blended in with that topic.

And this could be bad for two reasons…

For one, the topic literally becomes synonymous with your name. Who’s that guy that covers hormone therapy?

It becomes easier to be forgotten in someone’s mind.

When AI enables every niche to produce to infinity pieces of content per day, and the only thing left to differentiate is personal brand, you want your name to be the thing people remember…not the topic.

The second reason niches could be suboptimal is that you’re tying yourself to the market interest in a topic.

That’s amazing when a topic is in vogue, and on an upswing, but can be catastrophic when a topic becomes old news and out of favor.

For example, creators tied to web3 content had their relevance and credibility washed away during the web3 bear market.

Many had to rebrand completely to start fresh.

When you are the niche, it gives you durability to withstand topic-specific volatility.

If you really boil it down, the purpose of having a niche is so that when a fan shares you with a friend, they can tightly message your value prop, “Hey Dan, you gotta check out this guy, he makes the best AI videos.”

But my goal when people share me with someone else is that they say, “Yo, you gotta check out this dude Kallaway. He talks about the most interesting stuff.”

Why?

Because when “interesting” is the reason someone is introduced to me, I have a much wider surface area of applicability and a longer leash to entertain.

When a specific topic (“tech” or “AI”) is the share vector, people may lose interest in me as they lose interest in the topic.

Since most people have varied interests, making content on only one topic could get boring for them to consume after a while.

In my mind, I’ll grow much slower without niching down, but my true fans will be stickier, because they believe more in me than the topic.

This should translate to deeper fandom and wider purchase behavior on a long-time horizon. It gives me way more creative flexibility to play around.

Now I’ll admit, I’m not sure how much of this is me just trying to make an argument to support the fact that I don’t want to niche down, but it feels like there is some merit in not being tied to a single niche topic.

And to steelman, niching down on a specific topic will give you the fastest path to selling products in that niche, which is probably the dream outcome for all creators.

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