You Are a Niche of One

And Nobody Can Sell You a System for That

After trying to follow everyone else’s content strategy, I realized I was building a house I didn’t want to live in.

The blueprint was clean. Pick a niche. Establish authority. Create a content pillar system. Develop a value ladder. Optimize for conversions. Scale.

The language was always military in a way that told me nobody using it had ever actually been in the military, because real operations are messy and half the plan dissolves on contact with reality and you adapt or you die. These blueprints didn’t have room for adaptation. They had room for obedience.

So I was writing about “operations for creators” because some framework told me to pick a lane. And the writing was fine. Competent. The kind of thing that could’ve been written by anyone with a business degree and a ChatGPT subscription. It had no blood in it. No weird. No me.

I was producing content the way a factory produces widgets. Identical. Interchangeable. Safe.

Nobody needs another widget.

I killed it. All of it.

Burned the content calendar, deleted the pillar strategy, and started writing about whatever the hell I actually wanted to write about. Chaos magic one week. Japanese philosophy the next. Then a cosmic horror novella. Then a piece about guerrilla apartment gardening. Then military systems thinking applied to running a one-person operation. Then Gnostic theology. Then a rant about the VA. Then a guide to fermentation.

No theme. No funnel. No coherent brand strategy. Just a guy with too many interests and a Substack account, throwing things at the wall because the wall was there and throwing things felt honest.

It was the best decision I ever made.

Here’s how the creator economy works, if you let it work on you:

Someone who got lucky once, or who got lucky twice and built a course about getting lucky, tells you that the path to sustainable income is narrow focus.

“Niche down,” they say, like it’s a commandment handed down from the mountain. Pick one thing. Become the person for that thing. Build your authority. The riches are in the niches.

And it sounds right. It sounds like good business advice. It sounds like the kind of thing a reasonable person would do.

The advice is designed to make you legible to their system, not to make you effective at yours.

When you niche down, you become a predictable input in someone else’s marketing framework. You become categorizable. Sellable. Coachable. You become a customer for their course about how to succeed in the niche they told you to pick.

Nobody needs another widget. Including you.

The people giving this advice are not wrong about everything. Focus has value. Clarity has value. Knowing who you’re talking to has value.

But there’s a difference between clarity and amputation, and most niching advice is closer to surgery than strategy. They want you to cut away the parts of yourself that don’t fit the template.

The weird interests. The tangential obsessions. The connections between domains that nobody else sees because nobody else has your specific combination of experiences.

They want you to be less of yourself so you’re easier to categorize.

I tried it. It made me miserable and my writing mediocre. I am constitutionally incapable of caring about one thing at a time, and I suspect you might be too, because you’re still reading this.

A niche of one isn’t a marketing strategy. It’s a recognition.

You already are one. You were one before you read this. The specific combination of things you’ve lived through, the skills you’ve accumulated, the obsessions you can’t shake, the weird cross-domain pattern recognition that happens when you’ve studied enough different subjects to see the underlying structures, that combination is yours.

Nobody else has it. Nobody else can replicate it.

A niche of one means you stop trying to fit your work into someone else’s category and start letting the category emerge from your work.

For me, that looks like a weekly newsletter that might cover quantum consciousness on Sunday and sourdough bread the following Sunday and a long essay about what combat PTSD actually feels like the Sunday after that.

There’s no editorial calendar governing what comes next. There’s a master list of several hundred topics that interest me, and each week I write about whichever one has its teeth in my brain.

Some people will tell you this is suicide. You can’t build an audience without consistency. You can’t grow without a clear value proposition. You can’t monetize without a niche.

They’re wrong. Not about everything. But about the thing that matters most.

Nobody needs another widget. What they need is the thing only you would make.

There’s a concept in Japanese aesthetics called mono no aware, the gentle sadness of passing things.

The cherry blossom is beautiful precisely because it’s temporary. The impermanence is the point.

I think about this when I’m building things.

Not everything I make needs to justify its existence through revenue. Not everything needs to “serve the audience” or “move the needle” or whatever bloodless metric the business coaches are pushing this quarter. Some things deserve to exist because you wanted to make them and you did and now they’re in the world and that’s enough.

I wrote a cosmic horror novella because the images were in my head and they needed to come out. I built a guide to guerrilla apartment gardening because I’d learned how to grow food in 600 square feet and the knowledge felt worth sharing. I wrote about Gnostic creation myths because the parallels to modern institutional power structures were too obvious to ignore and nobody else was drawing the lines.

None of these fit a content strategy. All of them found readers.

Here’s the thing about building things to build them: when you make something because you genuinely care about it, that care is visible in the work. Readers can smell authenticity the way animals smell fear, instinctively, below the level of conscious analysis. They can also smell the absence of it. They know when you’re writing because you want to and when you’re writing because your content calendar told you to. The difference is the difference between a meal someone cooked because they love food and a meal assembled from a corporate recipe. Both might be technically competent. Only one feeds you.

When I stopped trying to be strategic and started trying to be honest, the work got better. The writing got sharper. The readers who showed up were the right readers, the weirdos, the pattern-seekers, the people who were allergic to guru culture and starving for someone who’d just say what they actually thought without running it through a brand-safety filter first.

I didn’t find my audience. My audience found me. Because I was finally making enough noise being myself that the signal could cut through.

Every few weeks someone asks me what system I use.

What’s the framework. What’s the method. How do they replicate what I’m doing.

The answer is uncomfortable: you can’t.

Not because I’m special. Because you’re special, and the thing that works for me won’t work for you because it’s built from the raw material of my specific life. 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, CBRE. Construction work. Manual labor. A Cuban wife. Combat trauma. An encyclopedia brain that won’t stop making connections between things that aren’t supposed to connect.

That’s my raw material. Yours is different. Your niche of one is built from whatever you’ve lived through, whatever you can’t stop thinking about, whatever you know that nobody else knows in quite the way you know it.

No course teaches that. No framework captures it. No guru can sell it to you because it’s already yours and always has been.

The only decision is whether to use it or keep pretending you’re supposed to be a widget.

I’m not a guru. I don’t have a system.

But I have observations from two years of doing this, and you can take them or leave them.

• Make things. Not content. Things. Essays, stories, guides, art, radio shows, zines, whatever form your weird brain wants to work in. Make them because you want to make them. Put them in the world. See what happens.

• Pay attention to what resonates, but don’t let it become a cage. When something connects with readers, that’s data. It’s useful. But it’s not a mandate. The piece that gets the most engagement is not automatically the piece you should write forever. Sometimes the thing that resonates most is the thing you were least strategic about, because strategy is often just a polite word for self-censorship.

• Stop asking permission. You don’t need a credential to write about consciousness. You don’t need a business degree to talk about operations. You don’t need anyone’s approval to explore the topics that interest you. The internet doesn’t have a bouncer. Walk in.

• Accept that some things won’t land. I’ve written pieces I loved that sank without a ripple. I’ve written pieces I thought were mediocre that people are still sharing months later. You can’t predict it. You can’t control it. You can only keep making things and let the audience decide what sticks. The willingness to make things that fail is the price of admission for making things that matter.

• Keep your overhead low and your expectations honest. I’m not building an empire. I’m building a body of work. The revenue target is modest on purpose, enough to supplement without compromising. When the money becomes the point, the work starts dying. I’ve watched it happen to better writers than me. They start optimizing for what sells instead of what’s true, and the readers can feel the shift, and they leave, and then there’s nothing left.

• Find your people, not your audience. An audience is a number. People are humans who think like you, who are hungry for the same kind of honest, unfiltered, weird-ass exploration that you’re hungry for. They’ll find you if you’re making enough signal. They won’t find you if you’ve sanded off all your edges to fit a template.

What does this look like from the outside?

Messy. It looks messy from the outside.

No consistent topic. No predictable format. Some weeks it’s philosophy, some weeks it’s fiction, some weeks it’s a practical guide with specific actionable steps, some weeks it’s a rant about institutional betrayal that goes on longer than it probably should.

It looks like someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

It’s actually someone who stopped caring what it looks like and started caring what it is.

There’s a difference between chaos and freedom. Chaos is random. Freedom is intentional.

I choose what to write each week based on what’s alive in my head, and that’s not random. It’s the most curated thing in the world, curated by a lifetime of specific experiences and obsessions that no algorithm and no content strategist could ever replicate.

Nobody needs another widget.

The internet is drowning in widgets. Identical newsletters with identical advice from identical people who all read the same three books and took the same two courses and are now teaching each other how to teach each other.

You know what the internet doesn’t have enough of? People who are just unapologetically themselves, making the things that only they would make, for the people who’ve been waiting for exactly that thing without knowing it existed.

That’s a niche of one.

You already are one.

The only question is whether you’re going to act like it.

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Joe Forrest publishes Niche of One, a weekly counterculture newsletter for pattern-seekers, weirdos, and independent thinkers who question consensus reality. He’s a veteran, polymath writer, and recovered chaos magician who covers consciousness exploration, Japanese philosophy, institutional critique, creative fiction, and operations frameworks for people building lives outside the template. He writes from Nashville, Tennessee, and maintains that the best credential is a life actually lived.

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