Don’t pick a writing niche. Find the one only you can own.
How to build a niche from first principles
🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.
While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.
You can buy my book Permissionless here.
Most writers choose a niche by looking outward.
They study what’s popular.
Possibly, compare audience sizes.
They search for gaps within established categories: productivity, personal finance, business, creativity, the eternally nebulous “self-improvement.”
And then they squeeze themselves into whichever box appears most promising // profitable.
It’s the current best practice x best advice you’ll hear from every authorial charlatan flogging a course.
But 9 times out of 10, it’s the reason your work becomes completely forgettable.
When you start with the market, you inherit the market’s language, assumptions, and boundaries. You inherit someone else’s idea of what a Good Writer should write about, and you end up writing competent variations of ideas readers have already encountered from people with more experience, more authority, and a larger following.
The resulting output reads as lifeless dreck. It may be useful, and it may even perform well occasionally. But it gives off the unmistakable aura of work produced to meet a “niche.”
I tell first-time writers to use first-principles thinking instead.
Don’t ask, “Which niche should I choose?”
Dismantle the concept of a niche and ask what makes one worth occupying in the first place?
Then rebuild yours from the raw materials of your own life…
A Niche Is Not a Topic
“Productivity” is not actually a niche.
Neither is marketing, psychology, technology, leadership, fitness, or personal finance. These are markets - vast territories containing thousands of writers saying roughly the same things.
A useful niche isn’t simply what you write about.
It is the distinct perspective from which you write about it, for a particular person facing a particular problem.
Compare the difference:
I write about productivity.
Vs:
I help ambitious people who hate rigid systems build a calmer way of working.
The first describes a category, but the second has tension, perspective, and a reader.
Readers don’t follow writers for access to a topic.
They can find information anywhere.
YouTube, TikTok, etc.
They follow writers who help them see familiar problems differently.
Your real “niche” is not the subject you cover.
It’s the intellectual territory you can explain better than almost anyone else because of the unusual combination of what fascinates you, what experience has taught you, and whom you understand.
Why Conventional Niche Advice Produces Conventional Writing
Most niche advice follows the same sequence:
Find a growing market.
Identify a popular problem.
Study successful creators.
Publish your version of what already works.
All of which can help you manufacture content, but it won’t help you develop a body of work.
That is because it treats writing as a positioning exercise before treating it as an act of thought.
When you reverse-engineer a niche from market demand, your prose comes off like an assigned College Essay. You can reproduce the format, use the right hooks, and publish on schedule, but readers can sense when the writer arrived at the subject through opportunity and instruction over conviction.
More dangerous though: starting with an established category means accepting someone else’s map.
You accept their definitions of the important questions.
You accept their vocabulary.
You accept on their terms.
First-principles thinking asks you to temporarily discard that map.
Replace “Where is there room for me?” with three more useful questions:
What’s the one thing I can’t stop thinking about?
What’s the one thing I understand because I have lived it?
Who actually needs that understanding?
The Three Raw Materials of a Durable Niche
A niche capable of supporting years of meaningful work needs three ingredients:
Obsession × earned insight × unmet need
Obsession gives you energy.
Earned insight gives you authority.
Unmet need gives your writing relevance.
This is not a checklist where two out of three is good enough.
If one factor approaches zero, so does the value of the whole.
1. Inventory Your Obsessions, Not Your Interests
Interests are pleasant.
Obsessions are persistent.
An interest is something you enjoy reading about. An obsession follows you into the shower, interrupts unrelated conversations, and makes you open seventeen browser tabs past midnight like the crazed, fucked up little Wikipedia gremlin you are.
(You know precisely what I’m talking about.)
You can build ten articles around an interest, but you can build a decade of work, an entire lifetime of work around an obsession.
See: Tolkien’s obsession with myths, industrialisation and what drives men to make war…
See: Paul Millerd and his obsession with finding and teaching an alternative to trad work
To identify yours, ignore the subjects you think a serious writer is supposed to care about.
Ask instead:
What do I investigate without needing a reason?
Which problems do I keep returning to after everyone else has moved on?
What do I read about when nobody is watching?
What do I explain with more enthusiasm than the situation requires?
Which commonly accepted ideas irritate me because they feel incomplete or wrong?
Pay special attention to the obsessions that seem too narrow, impractical, or embarrassing.
Write down ten obsessions.
Then cross out anything you’ve gone ahead and included because it sounds intelligent, respectable, or commercially attractive. And don’t kid yourself. You’re the only one getting screwed by that.
2. Identify the Knowledge You Had to Earn
Obsession creates curiosity, but curiosity alone won’t create authority.
Your second raw material is knowledge acquired through contact with reality: decisions made, consequences absorbed, patterns observed, decisions fucked up and beliefs revised.
This is not the same as credentials.
Credentials may indicate that you studied something. Earned insight reveals that the subject changed you.
Ask yourself:
Where have I been tested repeatedly?
What have I learned through failure, responsibility, or prolonged exposure?
What can I see now that my younger self could not?
Which accepted explanations conflict with what I have witnessed?
What do beginners consistently misunderstand about work I know well?
What can I explain that cannot be learned from a summary or textbook?
Note: you’re not looking only // exclusively for expertise.
You’re looking for earned contradictions:
“People usually say X. My experience taught me Y.”
3. Find the Reader Experiencing the Sharpest Need
Writers ruin a promising niche by trying to make their audience too big, too early.
They write for “creatives,” “professionals,” or “people who want to improve their lives.”
These groups sound commercially attractive because they contain millions upon millions of people, but they’re too broad to capture effectively.
If you can’t imagine the moment in which someone needs your writing, you’ll struggle and fail to produce anything precise enough to get attention and garner a single reader.
Instead of asking how large the audience is, ask:
Who is repeatedly making an expensive mistake I know how to prevent?
Who would feel relieved - not merely informed - after reading what I know?
What problem can I describe in the exact language its sufferers use privately?
A strong niche is usually built around a specific tension.
Never “career advice for creatives,” always:
Career strategy for experienced creatives who want stability without turning their work into soulless content.
Never “leadership for founders,” always:
How first-time technical founders can lead former peers without becoming controlling or evasive.
Never “personal finance for freelancers,” always:
Financial systems for freelancers whose income is high, irregular, and psychologically difficult to trust.
When the right reader encounters precise language for a problem they have struggled to articulate, they don’t waste their time thinking, “This audience seems small.”
They think, “This was written for me.”
Find the Overlap
Now place your three lists beside one another:
What are you obsessed with
What has experience taught you
What does a specific reader urgently need
Obsession without earned insight produces enthusiasm without depth.
Earned insight without obsession produces technically correct writing you will eventually resent.
Obsession and insight without an unmet need produce a private journal.
Need without either of the other two produces generic content engineered for attention.
Broad niches sound familiar because they’re assembled from established categories. Original niches sound unusual // freakish because they’re assembled from a life no one else has lived.
Imagine, for example, someone who has:
an obsession with decision-making under uncertainty;
ten years of experience managing live events, where plans regularly collapse;
a deep understanding of anxious high performers who freeze when conditions become unpredictable.
They might want to write about “productivity,” but the right niche won't actually be “productivity.”
It might be:
Practical decision-making for high performers who need to act before they feel certain.
Narrower x easier to own.
Turn the Intersection Into a Point of View
Even a precise niche is not enough; you need a perspective - a POV.
Your point of view is the claim beneath your work: the idea you’ll explore, test, complicate, and defend across many pieces.
A useful way to articulate it is:
Most people believe ________.
My experience suggests ________.
This makes a difference, because ________.
For example:
Most people believe consistency comes from discipline.
My experience suggests it comes from reducing emotional negotiation.
This makes a difference, because people keep designing ambitious routines they must persuade themselves to follow every day.
Now the writer has more than a topic; they have an engine for generating ideas.
They can write about habits, environments, identity, motivation, software, planning, fatigue, and attention without becoming scattered, because every subject is examined through the same underlying lens.
A niche tells readers where you operate.
A point of view explains why your work could not have come from anyone else.
Test Your Niche With One Definitive Piece
Don’t breathlessly announce your new niche immediately.
Don’t redesign your website, rewrite every biography, or create a twelve-month content calendar.
Write one definitive piece.
Choose a problem sitting at the exact overlap of your obsession, your earned insight, and your reader’s unmet need. Then write the version that only you could write.
Use the details others omit.
Include exactly what experience forced you to unlearn.
Treat the reader as an intelligent adult capable of handling complexity.
Then publish it and study the response.
Look for stronger signals:
Did the right people recognize themselves?
Did readers reply with specific stories?
Did anyone say, “I thought I was the only one”?
Did the piece generate better questions?
Did writing it create ten more ideas?
Do you feel more curious about the subject now than before you began?
A promising niche creates energy on both sides.
Readers feel seen, and the writer discovers more territory to explore.
If the piece falls flat, adjust the coordinates.
Don’t abandon the entire framework after one attempt. Refine it.
A niche is not selected once.
It becomes clearer through repeated contact with readers and reality.
The Goal Is Not to Eliminate Competition
You don’t need to find a subject nobody has ever discussed.
That’s nearly impossible, and usually undesirable.
You need to develop a combination that nobody else can reproduce exactly:
your questions;
your experiences;
your contradictions;
your reader;
your language;
your way of noticing.
This is why copying another writer’s niche never quite works.
You can imitate their subject and format, but you can’t recreate the life that made their perspective credible.
The safest writing niche is never the biggest category or the emptiest market.
It’s the territory where your curiosity, experience, and usefulness reinforce one another so strongly that continuing to explore it feels almost inevitable.
Never
Which niche should I choose?
Ask:
What can I see because of where I have been - and who needs help seeing it too?
Answer that question precisely enough, and you’ll find the beginning of a body of work.
The most fascinating niche-seeking advice that I've read. 🤩
Nail. Head.
This excellent insight applies not only to content creation but to business design, too. Your thinking is unique and comprehensive. I'm a fan and a follower.