Don’t Pick a Niche. Pick a Lens
The Internet Doesn’t Need Another Niche Writer. It Needs You.
You’ve heard it a thousand times:
“Pick a niche.” “Narrow it down.” “Own a category.”
For a long time, that was good advice. Until it became a trap.
In the early 2000s, platforms like Blogger and WordPress made publishing accessible. Most early blogs were personal journals or tech musings. But by 2005, blogging shifted, and people started treating it as a serious tool for authority, SEO, and business. That’s when the “niche” advice took off online.
The same thing happened on YouTube. Around 2010, the algorithm began rewarding specialization: beauty channels, gaming channels, productivity hacks. The clearer your topic, the faster you grew. Niching down became the rule.
Twitter followed a similar arc. What began as a chaotic, conversational space slowly hardened into a platform for thought leaders and personal brands. Threads culture dominated. And once again, the message was clear: specialize or get left behind.
The common thread across all these platforms?
Picking a niche worked.
But here’s what most people miss:
What works early in a platform’s life cycle doesn’t always work later. As platforms mature, that early advantage collapses.
Today, the crypto guy or productivity gal is one of thousands. Each is posting variations of the same ideas, chasing the same attention.
And now, they’re not just competing with each other. They’re competing with AI. Tools that can generate niche content faster, cheaper, and increasingly, more convincingly. If your work follows a predictable formula, it’ll be overtaken by the very systems that automate predictability.
Because in the age of AI, the question isn’t whether you can create content. It’s whether your voice is worth listening to or not.
And in such a landscape, picking a niche won’t set you apart. It’ll bury you.
It’s no surprise, then, that so many writers feel stuck—or quietly burn out.
When a post flops, doubt creeps in, and you start wondering if you picked the wrong niche. You notice what’s working for others and feel tempted to shift again. Without realizing it, you start distorting your voice to match the algorithm. And slowly, the ideas that once mattered most start to feel distant—boxed in by the very strategy that was supposed to help you grow.
I admit it’s tempting to chase another framework, a sharper angle, or a better way to “position yourself.”
But maybe the problem isn’t how you’re packaging your work.
Maybe you don’t need a sharper niche. You just need a sharper lens.
The Writers Rising Today Aren’t Niche Specialists—They’re Thinkers
Substack now has 35 million active users.
In internet lingo, that still counts as early days.
And while you'd expect people rushing to dominate niches in the platform before they get saturated, what's happening is something quite different.
Substack has become home to a wide range of voices—not just niche experts, but generalists, essayists, cultural critics, and hybrid writer-entrepreneurs.
Instead of optimizing for a single pain point, Substack writers are creating spaces of reflection, meaning, and connection. The most compelling newsletters don’t emerge from a marketing playbook. They evolve in public, shaped by ongoing inquiry rather than fixed expertise.
And readers are responding. Increasingly, people subscribe not for a specific topic, but for a particular tone, depth, or worldview
Take
, for instance. He’s best known as a music critic, but his newsletter, The Honest Broker, is hardly just about music.One week he’s breaking down the economics of Spotify. The next he’s critiquing the cultural emptiness of algorithmic content. His topics vary widely, but they’re held together by something deeper: a coherent point of view.
Gioia doesn’t just comment on culture. He reveals its patterns—where it emerges from, how it gets co-opted, and what forces either nourish or erode it. Whether he’s writing about jazz, Substack, or the “dead internet,” his work points to a recurring truth: the deepest currents of innovation tends to come from the margins, not the mainstream.
That clarity doesn’t come from thin air. It’s the result of a deeply cultivated lens.
Gioia has spent decades reading across disciplines—history, philosophy, psychology—and it shows. His writing isn’t just informed; it’s contextualized. Ideas don’t float. They have roots.
His early career at Boston Consulting Group also adds a layer of insight. He doesn’t write like a consultant, but that analytical view gives him a sharp eye for how power moves, how markets behave, and how culture changes.
Another great example is
.A former culture writer at BuzzFeed News, Petersen didn’t leave traditional media to carve out a narrow niche. She built her newsletter, Culture Study, around a larger vision: to make sense of how power, identity, and public life shape the texture of our everyday experience.
Her essays don’t just examine burnout, labor, politics, or art in isolation. They dig beneath the surface—revealing how institutions erode public trust, how flawed narratives mask structural inequality, and how a culture built on efficiency often undermines the very values that sustain us: care, generosity, and shared well-being.
What sets Petersen apart is not a set of topics, but the coherence of point of view.
With a PhD in media studies and a background in journalism, she brings both intellectual clarity and human resonance to her writing. She blends personal reflection with cultural history and political analysis—not to conclude, but to reveal what typically goes unexamined. Her work resists the flattening of social media logic. It lingers in complexity. It names what others leave unsaid.
That’s the thread her readers return to—a deep commitment to justice, nuance, and care. Not content for its own sake, but writing that helps us understand what we’re part of, and what’s worth fighting for.
From Niche to Lens: Finding Your Own Point of View
A point of view is the lens that shapes how you write—what you notice, what you choose to say, and who you’re speaking to.
It’s made up of your history, your values, the patterns you’ve lived through, and the questions that won’t leave you alone.
Mine didn’t arrive in a flash of insight. It took shape slowly through a tension I carried, until it asked to be named.
For years, I was immersed in the world of performance-driven marketing. I helped launch startups in new markets. Grew a podcast to several thousand downloads a month. Built multi-tier programs, scaled newsletters, and sold millions in event tickets.
The machine worked, and I knew how to run it.
At some point, I stopped feeling inside the work. I was managing it, optimizing it, hitting milestones, but the thread that once pulled me forward felt increasingly distant.
I didn’t want to keep building things I didn’t believe in. I didn’t want to just become more efficient at something that no longer felt meaningful.
That’s when I returned to writing. Not as a marketing tool, but as a space to think clearly, to slow down, to reconnect.
And that’s where my point of view began to take shape.
Layer by layer, experience by experience, I started to notice what made it distinct.
Growing up in Brazil, spending 14 years in Europe, and working closely with Americans and Asians gave me an instinct for cultural nuance—a tendency to listen more, to translate between worlds, and to hold competing perspectives at once.
My early obsession with storytelling led me to study screenwriting, where I learned how to build tension, write with restraint, and let meaning emerge as much through subtext as structure.
Even my pull toward psychology—the same one that once made marketing so magnetic—began to shift. I no longer wanted to provoke reaction. I began to ask: what if writing could help people understand the roots of their behavior, not just manipulate them?
Taken together, these pieces revealed a throughline.
Writing is not just a tool for persuasion or growth. It’s a vehicle for clarity, connection, and crafting a meaningful life on your terms.
And in the process, I discovered that point of view isn’t something you find once and carry forever.
It’s something you return to—again and again—refining it through the act of writing.
Every time I sit down to write, I get a little closer to what matters. I see more clearly who I want to serve, what I want to challenge, and what feels worth saying.
That’s when better questions start to emerge:
What have I lived that feels worth sharing?
What truth do I keep circling in my own life?
What question won’t leave me alone?
What belief holds people back that I know is worth challenging?
Who do I feel drawn to serve—regardless of reach and profits?
And these aren’t prompts with neat answers. They’re invitations. You return to them the same way you return to your writing—curiously, and often.
Because once your point of view starts to take shape, something shifts.
You stop chasing “what works.” You don’t need to switch niches or mimic trends. You’re no longer optimizing your originality out of the work.
People follow you not for the category, but for how you see. They trust that whatever topic you take on, you’ll bring a certain coherence, depth, and honesty to it.
That’s what makes the work last—not just in a moment, but over time.
So next time someone hands you a formula or tells you the fastest way to grow is to flatten yourself into a niche, pause for a second and question it.
It might work for a while. But it often costs you the very thing that makes your writing worth reading: your unique voice.
The clearer path isn’t always the fastest.
But it’s the one that honors your contradictions, your curiosity, your craft.
Because in a world chasing reach and scale at all costs…
The writer who stays rooted is the one readers keep returning to.