Why I choose an intersection for my Substack, not a niche.
Two years of hesitation, a thirty-minute decision. Why I refused to pick a niche for my Substack, and what I mean by it.
It took me two years to make the decision. Not because I didn’t know what I wanted to write. Because I knew exactly what I no longer wanted: my best thinking lost to a feed that decides who gets to see it.
I have had a blog. I am on LinkedIn, on Instagram. I used Kit for my newsletter. Twenty years online, and always the same pattern: starting something, then moving on because the new platform looked more interesting. Looking back, I should have had one place, like Seth Godin, a single source of truth that everything leads back to. It went differently.
The insight that remained was a classic one: own your readers, own your content. Not putting your most important work on a social feed, but on your own url, with your own SEO, and by now also AEO. In a way, it just had to be what it used to be: your own website. But Substack offered something extra I wanted to try.
Still, it took another year before I made the leap. After twenty years on social media, you know one thing for certain: no platform comes without a price. But when I jumped, it took half an hour.
When I looked into how Substack actually worked, what the unwritten rules were, I saw all the different strands side by side: the content creator selling a business through paid tiers and digital products, the journalist or expert writing long reads from their field, the influencer who, after years on Instagram, had embraced the long-read model.
And everywhere the same advice: choose your niche. Pick your topic, pick your focus.
The same advice preached on LinkedIn. Exactly what I wanted to get away from.
The problem with that advice is not that it is wrong. The problem is where it comes from. It gets given for two reasons: because you can sell one thing better than three, or because the person giving the advice can only really talk about one thing themselves. Neither of those is a reason that is about me.
So I looked for the ones who didn’t do it that way. They exist. Fortunately.
You could ask why I even bother with this question. Fair enough, I ask myself the same thing. Because of course I also hope for a successful Substack, and for something to come of it. And we are trained far too easily to look for someone to teach us how, while success can come from far more directions than the one formula currently being sold.
So only one question remained: why am I starting this? Because I want to be free in what I write about, without being punished by an algorithm that decides my readers won’t find this interesting. Here, you simply get my article in your inbox. You decide. Not the algorithm.
So what will I write about?
This is not my old newsletter, focused solely on my Own Your Story programmes. Here I write about what interests me and moves me, and that will always sit somewhere between humanities, tech and business. Sometimes linked to OYS, sometimes to bookto, my tech dev work. Sometimes to neither.
There will be a paid membership option for those who want to delve deeper into specific topics. And a founding members tier, for those who want to follow the writing process of my next book up close.
That is the plan. I hope it works.
Because I have wanted, for a long time now, a place to develop my voice without the influence of an algorithm or a template. I hope I am making the right choice by being here.