Go Smaller: The Case for Getting Dangerously Specific with Your Creative Work

At some point, someone told you that you were being too specific.

Maybe it was a well-meaning mentor who said your audience would be too small. Maybe it was your own anxiety, whispering that if you niched down too far, you'd run out of people to talk to. Maybe it was just the general pressure of the internet, which seems to reward the broadest possible appeal — the most shareable, most relatable, most palatable version of everything.

Here's my take: that instinct to broaden is one of the most expensive creative mistakes you can make.

The Broad Appeal Trap

Let's be honest about what happens when you try to appeal to everyone. You start softening your edges. You pull back on the opinions that might alienate someone. You cover topics that are adjacent to what you actually care about because they seem more universally interesting. You round off all the sharp, weird, specific corners that made your work interesting in the first place.

And then you wonder why nothing you make seems to stick.

Broad appeal doesn't create devotion. It creates mild interest. And mild interest doesn't build a creative career — it builds an audience that follows you the same way they follow a hundred other accounts: passively, half-attentively, and ready to move on the second something more specific to their actual interests shows up.

Specificity is what creates devotion. And devotion is the only currency that actually matters.

The Counterintuitive Math of Specificity

Here's something that sounds backwards until you see it in action: the more specific you get, the more people feel like you're talking directly to them.

A newsletter about productivity reaches a lot of people who are vaguely interested in being more organized. A newsletter about productivity specifically for freelance illustrators who are also parents of young kids? That reaches a much smaller group — but every single person in that group feels like it was written for them. And that feeling is everything.

When someone discovers content that feels like it was made specifically for their situation, their interests, their weird little corner of the world — they don't just follow. They tell people. They come back. They buy things. They become the kind of audience member who actually shows up.

The creator with 8,000 deeply engaged followers in a specific niche is almost always in a better position than the creator with 80,000 passive followers who sort of like what they do.

What "Dangerously Specific" Actually Means

I'm not just talking about picking a topic. I'm talking about going specific in a way that makes you a little nervous — the kind of specific where you think, Is this too weird? Is this too niche? Will anyone actually care about this?

That nervous feeling is usually a sign you're onto something.

The creators who build genuinely devoted audiences tend to have something in common: they went somewhere specific that felt risky. The guy who only writes about the history of specific buildings in mid-century American cities. The illustrator who only draws portraits of people's dogs in the style of Renaissance paintings. The podcast that covers only the business side of independent bookstores in small towns.

None of those sound like mass-appeal propositions. All of them have more dedicated followers than a dozen generic versions of the same idea.

Specificity signals expertise. It signals genuine interest rather than calculated positioning. And it signals to exactly the right people that they've found their person.

The Fear Worth Naming

The real resistance to specificity isn't strategic — it's emotional. Going specific means excluding people. It means saying, essentially, this isn't for everyone, and that's intentional. For a lot of creators, that feels like rejection before it even happens.

But here's the reframe: you're not rejecting anyone. You're just being honest about who you're for. And that honesty is a gift to the people who are actually your people, because it saves them time and tells them immediately that they've found something worth paying attention to.

Every creative decision is a trade-off between breadth and depth. Going broad gets you more surface area. Going specific gets you depth — and depth is where loyalty lives.

How to Find Your Specific

This isn't about manufacturing a niche through market research. The specificity that works is the specificity that's already true about you — the intersection of what you know, what you love, and what you can't stop thinking about even when you try.

Start with the overlap. What topics, skills, or obsessions do you have that don't usually show up in the same conversation? The unusual combination is often where your specific lives. A former teacher who makes furniture. A finance professional who's obsessed with urban foraging. A graphic designer who's really into cold-case true crime. The overlap isn't the niche — it's the perspective that makes your work on any topic distinctly yours.

Notice what you can't help but add. When you're writing or making something, what do you keep wanting to include that you talk yourself out of because it seems too tangential? That tangent might actually be your specific. It's the thing that makes your take different from everyone else covering the same topic.

Go one level deeper than feels comfortable. If you think you've found your niche, ask yourself: can I go more specific? Usually the answer is yes. And usually that next level is where things get interesting.

Stop trying to future-proof your appeal. A lot of creators resist specificity because they worry about painting themselves into a corner — what if they want to change direction later? But audiences follow people, not topics. If you've built genuine trust through specific, authentic work, your audience will follow you when you evolve. They're not there for the subject matter. They're there for you.

The Smallest Audience Is the Most Powerful

There's an idea that's been floating around creative communities for years — the concept of a thousand true fans. The argument is that you don't need millions of followers. You need a specific group of people who genuinely love what you do and are willing to support it.

That concept is more relevant now than it's ever been, in an internet that's simultaneously more crowded and more fragmented than it's ever been. The path to standing out isn't getting bigger. It's getting more precisely, unapologetically, specifically you.

So go smaller. Go weirder. Go more specific than anyone told you was safe.

That's where the real audience is waiting.