Content Without a Destination
Why Following Your Nose Beats Niching Down
The dominant voice in the personal brand building world says: niche down, find your audience, build an offer.
I’ve been resistant to this for a long time, and I think I’ve finally worked out why it bothers me so much. It isn’t that the advice is wrong in some narrow, tactical sense. If you want to grow a LinkedIn following about B2B SaaS marketing, then yes, talk about B2B SaaS marketing every day. The algorithm will reward you. But the advice contains a hidden assumption that I think, for some people at least, is genuinely destructive: that you should know where you’re going before you start walking. I don’t know exactly where I’m going, and I’m starting to think that’s not a problem to solve. It’s the whole point.
Direction as a Product, Not an Input
The standard model treats direction as an input. You decide what you’re about, you build content around that identity, and then you attract an audience that validates the decision. It’s clean. It’s logical. It’s also completely backwards for some people.
What I’ve found is that direction isn’t something you choose and then execute on. It’s something that emerges from the act of thinking out loud over time. I want to have thoughts and talk about things, and those things then create the direction. The direction is a product of where my mind is already going, not some strategic decision made in advance.
When you niche down prematurely, you’re forcing yourself into a corridor before you’ve even explored the building. You’re committing to a path based on what you think you should be interested in, or what seems commercially viable, or what some growth strategist told you would work. And then you’re stuck creating content about something that might not actually matter to you, which is precisely how you end up as one of those people on LinkedIn whose posts read like they were written by someone who doesn’t really care about what they’re saying - because they don’t.
The Optionality Argument
Here’s what I think content actually does when you let it breathe: it creates optionality. Not obligation. Not commitment. Options.
There’s an unknown quantity of opportunities that you can’t even possibly imagine right now. Not in a vague, motivational-poster sense, but in a very practical one. You’re limited in your experience of the world, we all are. Particularly in a professional capacity. And so there are possibilities available to you that you literally can’t conceive of from where you’re currently standing, because you haven’t been exposed to the people, ideas, or contexts that would make those possibilities visible.
Content is how you expand that exposure. But only if you’re creating content that actually reflects where your thinking is, rather than content optimised around some predetermined niche that you chose six months ago and now feel trapped by.
I recently spoke to a friend who wants to create content and build their profile but the fear stopping them is that putting their thoughts and ideas out into the world will create situations they don’t want to be in. That if something resonates, they’ll be forced into conversations or opportunities that feel misaligned.
And whilst I understand the concern, the mistake is imagining that the totality of opportunities that would get created are ones you don’t want to participate in. In other words, they’re not opportunities for you. They’re threats. And that framing just isn’t true. You have agency at every stage of the process. Clicking “post” doesn’t set off a chain of dominoes that ends with you trapped in a meeting you hate. You can say no at any point. The content creates the options. You choose which ones to take.
The Three-Year Thought Experiment
I keep coming back to this thought experiment, and it’s the one that makes the anti-niche case most clearly for me.
Even if today you’re commenting on people’s posts about AI agent swarms, in three years you might be commenting on someone’s posts about how to design a traditional pattern on top of sourdough bread as you bake it. There’s no rules. We can do whatever we want.
That sounds flippant, but I mean it seriously. The assumption behind niching down is that your interests today will be your interests in three years. That’s almost certainly not true. And if you’ve spent those three years building an audience and an identity around a specific niche, you’ve also built a cage. You’ve optimised yourself into a corner where the algorithm, the audience, and your own professional identity all resist the very evolution that makes a creative life worth living.
But if you’ve spent those three years talking about whatever genuinely interests you, following the threads of your own curiosity, the body of work you’ve built is something much more interesting. It’s a record of how your thinking evolved. It’s a demonstration of intellectual honesty. And it’s created a surface area for connection with people who share your actual values and interests, not just the ones you strategically ‘target’.
You might be up for an opportunity that presents itself in three years that you’re not up for today - that you couldn’t even imagine today. And in three years, you’ll have wished you’d been creating content and building audience and creating that domain authority and track record, so that when you do feel ready, you’re well positioned for whatever comes next.
Refinement Happens Naturally
The other thing I’ve noticed is that the refinement everyone’s so anxious to impose from the start happens on its own if you give it time.
Over time, the stuff you’re putting out gets refined. Not just in the structure and the quality and the mechanics of it, but in what you’re talking about. You start to zero in on different things. You notice which topics you keep returning to, which conversations energise you, which responses from people make you think, “yes, that’s the thing.” The niche reveals itself. You don’t have to manufacture it.
This is fundamentally different from the “niche down and build an offer” approach. That approach says: decide, then execute. What I’m describing is: explore, then notice. The exploration is the strategy. The noticing is what turns it into something coherent over time.
The Real Risk Isn’t Doing It Wrong
I think there’s a part of all of this that I’m speaking to myself about as much as anyone else. There are days, sometimes whole weeks, where I struggle to believe that writing without a clear destination leads anywhere positive. And in the short term, it doesn’t. There’s no immediate payoff for talking about whatever happens to be on your mind this week. The algorithm doesn’t reward intellectual honesty. The growth strategists would tear their hair out.
But in the long term, it creates something that a niche strategy never can: a life you actually want to live. Because you’ve been following your own curiosity the entire time, the opportunities that present themselves are, by definition, aligned with who you actually are, not with some strategic persona you constructed years ago.
The real risk isn’t that you fail to build an audience by refusing to niche down. The real risk is that you succeed at niching down and then discover you’ve built an audience for someone you don’t want to be. You’ve optimised yourself into a professional identity that has nothing to do with what actually matters to you. And then you’re right back where you started, except now you’ve got 10,000 followers watching you figure out that you hate your own content.
Talk about what you want to talk about. Push content out that you’re happy to stand behind - let the rest take care of itself. And if in three years you’re writing about sourdough bread, excellent. At least it’ll be something that actually fulfils you.
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