Widening the aperture
Starting niche is smart, but the challenge for publishers is how (and when) to go broader
With the scale era firmly in the rearview mirror, the age of niches is upon us. The hunt for flimsy connections to an audience has given way to an appreciation for communities of like-minded people, which are often by definition much smaller.
Morning Brew CEO Austin Rief made this point in a recent chat that the opportunities he sees are far narrower than the broad Morning Brew clones you see popping up these days. “There’s too much pattern-matching in newsletters now in trying to replicate what we did,” he said. This strikes me as right. People tend to pattern match, even unconsciously, and end up attempting variations of models that have worked. This is why many newsletters are the Stratechery of X -- and why there are so many Morning Brew of X.
Instead, the biggest opportunities still lie in going narrow and deep. That means, more often than not, having a lens that isn’t all-encompassing. Uber did not start as a super app with a logistics network for rides, groceries, delivery food, etc. It began far narrower in 2009: black cars in San Francisco, where getting a taxi was long a nightmare. Only three years later Uber widen the aperture by launching the more affordable UberX service. What I think is often missing in the paens to starting small is nailing the needed widening of the aperture, both in how to widen and the timing.
