My Internet Golden Handcuffs

To niche-down or not to niche-down

Author

Will Stern
May 10, 2023

I generated this image with Midjourney by using the prompt “a writer typing while the walls close in on him”

Welcome to my new subscribers :) This morning’s post is not totally typical for this newsletter, as I’ve chosen to forgo my normal topic of covering interesting and little-known stories for a bit of a mini-essay on the effects of audience on the content of a creator and the oft-poor incentive structure that comes along with it.

This also marks my first newsletter since committing to writing consistently on a weekly cadence. A major milestone I covered in the prologue to last week’s piece, I’m also continuing to provide my quote and reccomended reading of the week interspersed within this post.

Enjoy, and please direct all constructive criticism to [email protected].

My job is pretty specific.

I deal with collectibles — stuff ranging from classic cars to Warhols. But on Twitter, I’ve found most of my following comes from sports cards and related pieces. It’s not an accident — I’ve probably posted about cards more than any other category.

Both because of a personal interest, but also because of the ease in which I can post pictures of high-dollar cards and memorabilia from the Rally archive, a strategy which has proven a great method for funneling folks to the main brand account but also attract a somewhat significant following from collectors interested in the space.

The resulting dilemma has emerged:

  1. My main audience is hyper-focused on sports cards

  2. It’s an uphill battle to convert said audience into readers of my work pertaining to subject matters other than sports cards (like this email)

I’ve posted a bit about this before, but the best example of this came last week. I was able to prove this by ‘calling my shot’ so to speak — proving this theory with a single tweet.

The fact that I knew before posting that this would do well numbers-wise is a testament to the easily gamed algorithm of the sports card Twitter world (Post pictures of millions of dollars worth of cards, rinse, repeat).

As an important aside…

I would not only have a far smaller social media following (I only have a couple thousand on Twitter, so we’re not talking crazy numbers) if I never posted about cards, but without my somewhat engaged online audience, I never would have had the confidence to start my own newsletter.

While the sports card example is unique to myself and maybe few others, it’s a widely applicable struggle.

Twitter is the top conversion funnel for newsletter subscribers (for many, though surely there are plenty exceptions) and regardless of your niche following, it’s an uphill battle to onboard members of that audience into a base of readers relating to entirely unrelating topics.

Quote of the Week

“In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do. Trust the exponential, be patient, and be pleasantly surprised”

-Sam Altman

I’ve begun to think of this as the internet version of Golden Handcuffs.

I would have 10% of my follower count if I never posted about sports cards. Let alone if I didn’t have the benefit of my association and frequent retweets from the Rally brand account.

So despite the issue of misaligned audiences, it’s a problem that arises from a degree of success (which makes it possible for me to have any audience in the first place).

This brings me to the ever-present incentive to niche-down. If I wrote solely about sports cards or collectibles (I have written plenty about tangentially related topics), I would be able to convert a far higher degree of my audience.

But the cost?

Sacrificing my freedom to cover the scatter-shot array of subject matter I love diving into and have covered in these first ~50 newsletters.

Resisting the urge to take the easiest path and simply give my audience the equivalent of product market-fit for content, I’ve opted to take the undoubtedly more difficult (growth-wise) route. Write whatever I feel like & hope my content will be good enough to overcome the biases of my audience.

This isn’t some sort of masochistic self-imposed challenge. I don’t want to be stuck writing about sports cards. They’re fun, I like buying and selling them and can nerd out with the best, but I want people to read my work because they subscribe to me as a storyteller — in every sense of the word, across an undefined landscape of topics. There’s nothing wrong with being the sports card guy… as long as that’s what you want to be.

For me, it isn’t.

I want to be a writer who happens to post pictures of pretty cardboard. Not sports card ‘influencer’ with a blog.

I read it now I’m making you

👉 I am recommended the following with the full acknowledgement of how tacky it is for a young aspiring writer to recommend anything written by David Foster Wallace given his reputation as the faux-intellectual author of choice by many fitting my profile. But I don’t care, because a) He’s talented and b) This piece is just too good. DFW’s love of tennis is more than well-documented… it makes up about 85% of his classic (and somewhat unreadable) novel Infinite Jest. But when I uncovered this piece in the NYT in which DFW describes the magic of watching Roger Federer on a tennis court, I couldn’t simply sit on my hands. If you’re a fan of tennis, DFW, or just beautiful writing, I couldn’t implore you to read this piece more emphatically. One of the most beautiful sports pieces ever written: