How to find a niche for your newsletter

I have been wanting to write online since 2019. I have been journaling for 12 years now but couldn’t get around to writing publicly.

From 2020-2022, I joined many writing cohorts but ended up either dropping out or not getting to the finish line.

I never wanted to write to scale a product or make an income. One of my goals now is to monetise my newsletter but that was never my main goal.

My main struggle watching creators and marketers write online was I didn’t have a niche and couldn’t find one. I have had so many experiences in life. I have lived in nine countries.

I switched careers from a lawyer to an entrepreneur and now doing much more but couldn’t find “that one thing” that I thought people can relate to.

Here are 5 actionable methods I have used to find a scalable niche:

Lean into your community: I’ve been part of some incredible communities: Generalists, ProductSchool, SheFi, LetterGrowth, and many more. Each community has inspired me to understand the problems of community members and gave me ideas.
You don’t need to spotlight growth hacks or a success story: If you’re starting a newsletter, you don’t need to profile 0.001% of success stories of anomalies or jump in on trends like AI or web3 to grow. There’s an audience for everything. I’ve seen super-niche newsletters on sustainable farming and organic foods grow to millions of subscribers. Clearly, those success stories aren’t always discussed.
Niche out and then in: Start writing about all your interests. When you’re starting out, a great way to find your niche is by learning what you enjoy writing about and what works through sharing regularly.
You don’t need to be a domain expert: You can always start writing about something you are interested in learning, start learning it, and share your journey on doing this. The majority of no-code newsletters were built by makers who were learning these tools on-to-go while scaling their newsletters.
You are your own niche: Your experiences, insights, and lessons learned could be your niche. So many writers, including Oprah, speak solely about lessons they’ve learned through making mistakes, and that resonates with so many people.

I finally found my niche not through my success stories but through my own failures. I have built and scaled two successful businesses now, but my first attempt was building, which failed, is where I learned the most. I found a niche by sharing my don'ts instead of success stories.

I learnt more from mistakes than from a productivity book, hack, or learning system. So why not let that be a niche in itself? I write to share all of my failures and lessons of builders who have had to sunset a product, project, or idea through SunsetClub (https://www.sunsetclub.substack.com)