How I Grew to 250k Followers Without Choosing a Niche
When I first started my business, I thought I had to niche down to be successful. Where I once shared my life freely on platforms like Instagram, I suddenly felt the pressure to present only one side of myself: the coach, the strategist, the personal brand expert. And while, yes, I do attribute this to helping me book some of my first clients, there was always a part of me that felt like something was missing — like I wasn’t able to reach the full capacity of what I knew I was capable of.
It wasn’t until I took my road trip from Oakland to Boston that something shifted. I started posting personal reflections, voiceovers, and glimpses of the world as I was seeing, not with a strategy in mind, but simply because I wanted to. Just for the joy of creating. And to my surprise, that was when everything changed.
That year, I tripled my business revenue. Not because I doubled down on my niche — but because I let people into what was really happening in my life. I opened up about my experiences, my hopes, my dreams, and yes, even my struggles. And as a result, people found my program, Personal Brand Accelerator, because they first found me.
That experience taught me something I now teach every one of my clients: social media can be a tool to help you grow your career, land more clients, publish your book, or get your message out into the world. But it’s also a place to share your life, your humanity, and your aliveness. You don’t have to choose one or the other. And you don’t necessarily have to pick a niche to grow: In fact, for most people — the better strategy is not to pick a niche, but to let yourself and your life become the niche.
In this post, I’m going to break down exactly what that means, how it works, and how you can start building a personal brand that leaves room for all of you — not just one small, curated slice, but by letting your life, your voice, your evolution be the storyline.
TLDR | Key Takeaways:
Niching down can help businesses and some creators grow faster by making their content easier to categorize, recognize, and recommend.
But people aren’t companies — we’re layered, evolving, and human. Applying corporate branding rules to personal brands often creates more problems than it solves.
At first, picking a niche can feel clean and safe. Over time, it often becomes limiting, stifling creativity, and creating a disconnect between your real life and your online presence.
The alternative? Become the niche. Share your experiences, your perspective, your evolution. Let your life — not a rigid category — be the thread that ties everything together.
Think of your content as a living story, not a set of boxes. The season you're in right now is the story — and when that season shifts, you invite your audience to shift with you.
If niching down no longer feels good, it’s not because you’re failing. It might just be time for a new approach.
No matter what path you choose, you’ll experience seasons of growth and seasons of stillness — and that's normal.
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for personal branding. You find your way by showing up, experimenting, adjusting — and trusting yourself.
Why is niching down considered important?
For businesses, bigger brands, or even some content creators, niching down can often be one of the smartest moves. It gives your content a clear purpose. It helps people recognize and trust what they’ll get from your page. And from an algorithm perspective, it does make it easier to categorize and recommend your content to the right people.
It makes it easier for people to understand you quickly.
When you’re clear about what you offer and who you help, people don’t have to guess.
They immediately know, "This is for me" or "This isn't."
It helps algorithms categorize and surface your content.
Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn — they all rely on patterns to recommend posts to new audiences.
If your content consistently fits a recognizable pattern (e.g., “personal finance tips” or “healthy recipes”) it's easier for the algorithm to know who to show it to.
It builds credibility faster.
Specializing can position you as "the go-to person" for a specific problem.
This can lead to faster audience growth, more referrals, and quicker monetization opportunities (think courses, coaching, books, speaking gigs, etc.)
Where "Niching Down" Really Comes From
It’s important to note here that the idea of niching down didn’t come from creators. It came from corporate marketing veterans.
When branding first became a discipline, the goal was to position companies clearly in the minds of consumers. You wanted someone to think of one thing when they thought of your brand.
Nike? Just do it.
Coca-Cola? Happiness in a bottle.
Apple? Innovation and design.
Simplicity was the strategy. The sharper the focus, the faster people could remember you — and the easier it was to dominate a category. For businesses, that kind of clarity was (and still is) a huge advantage. It drives recognition. It builds trust. It makes decisions easier.
So when personal branding came into the picture (really just a few years ago), it made sense that a lot of that thinking got carried over: Find your niche. Own one idea. Make yourself easy to categorize.
And in some cases, that advice can still be helpful — especially if you’re building a company, launching a product, or establishing yourself in a very specific industry.
But here’s where it gets complicated: People aren't companies. We aren’t products designed for a shelf, and we aren’t static ideas, distilled down into a tagline. We are layered, curious, and ever-evolving. And trying to apply corporate branding rules to human beings often creates more problems than it solves.
The Real Problem with Niching Down
I’ve worked with hundreds of people on their personal brands, and no matter how different their goals are, the story is almost always the same. At first, choosing a niche feels like the right move. It feels clean. Safe. You know what you’re going to post. You know what your account is "about." There's comfort in having clear lines around what belongs and what doesn’t — especially when you're just starting out.
But over time, something subtle starts to happen:
You begin to censor yourself before you even create.
New ideas feel risky if they don’t “fit” the niche.
Sharing starts to feel like a chore, instead of a place you come alive.
The content feels repetitive — not because you’ve run out of ideas, but because you’ve backed yourself into a corner.
Your identity begins to split.
The version of you that shows up online starts to drift away from the person you are in real life.
You feel the pressure to perform as a single version of yourself, even as you keep growing and changing behind the scenes.
You hesitate to share the new passions, the different sides of yourself, for fear of confusing the people who once loved you for who you used to be.
Over time, the brand feels like a costume you have to keep wearing.
Growth becomes harder — not easier.
Your early growth plateaus as the niche gets narrower.
The audience that once felt drawn to your energy starts to disengage, sensing the gap between who you are and what you're showing.
You find yourself trapped between maintaining what you built and wanting to step into who you’re becoming
Pivoting feels scarier than ever, because you’re not sure who will still be with you if you do.
If any of this feels familiar, I want you to know: It’s not because you’re doing something wrong. It’s simply what happens when we try to apply business rules to something as alive and ever-changing as a human life.
The Alternative to Niching Down
When people talk about "niching down," or when marketers talk about building a brand, what they’re really trying to do is make something that isn't human — a company — feel more human. That’s the whole point of branding: to create the feeling of a personality, a point of view, a set of values people can recognize and connect to.
The irony is — if you’re already a human, you don’t need to manufacture that. You already are the brand. You already are the niche. Your experiences, perspective, and evolution are things that naturally create the kind of resonance brands are working so hard to replicate.
So, when you stop trying to squeeze yourself into a category, and instead let yourself be seen in your fullness — that’s when people really connect. They’re not just following for a piece of information. They’re following because something in you stirs something in them. They’re not just here for what you know, they’re here for who you are becoming.
If trying to choose a niche has ever made you feel stuck, boxed in, or disconnected from yourself, just know this: you don’t have to splice pieces of yourself to fit into a single category to build a strong personal brand. You don’t have to exclude pieces of yourself to become more "marketable."
Instead, you can become the niche.
How to Become the Niche
If you’re wondering how to actually do this — how to build a personal brand without boxing yourself in — here’s what I recommend, based on what I’ve learned building my own brand and seen in hundreds of others:
Trust your instincts. Share what you feel called to share.
You don’t need a perfectly rational reason to post something. If it feels important to you, that’s enough.
When I was writing my book, I documented the process. When I was planning my wedding, I shared updates and reflections about the experience. When we started renovating our home, I posted about that too. I’m not a wedding planner. I’m not an interior designer. But those were real parts of my life, and they mattered to me, so I shared them.
And what I found was: that’s often when people feel the most connected to my content.
I had so many people message me saying, "I loved following your home renovation projects, they were so fun to watch."
Note: Your content doesn’t have to be perfectly tied to your business to be effective. If you’re attracting genuine attention — and your deeper work is visible and available on your page — people will find their way to it (out of curiosity, not by hard selling) which is what we’ve seen be even more effective for our clients.
Ditch "content pillars." Draw a circle instead.
The old "content pillar" strategy — posting strictly about three to five topics — works for some, but for most of my clients and students, it ends up feeling stifling. It builds walls when what you really need is space to move.
Instead, draw a circle.
Decide what belongs inside the circle — the themes, topics, parts of your life you want to share — and let everything outside the circle be off-limits.
For example, when I was in my mid-twenties, I made a conscious decision to stop sharing about my dating life. Even though it had once been part of what I posted, it started to feel like a boundary was being crossed. So I moved it outside of my content circle.
By drawing a circle, you still have structure — but it's a structure that honors your growth, rather than trapping you inside an outdated version of yourself.
Let people see your struggles, not just your strengths.
Real growth happens on social media when you take people along for the ride — when you let them see the evolution as it's happening, not just the polished ending.
There’s actual psychology behind this. We love following a journey. We love to see a process unfold in real time. It gives us something to root for — and it reminds us that our own messy, unfinished lives are okay too.
When I finished writing my book, I shared the very real experience of burnout that followed. It felt vulnerable to post about it. Part of me worried — Would people think I was weak? Inconsistent? Would it make me less credible? But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that another high will come. And when it does, the people who have walked with me through the mud — through the doubts, the questions, the quiet seasons — will feel the stakes of the story.
They’ll understand what it costs to get there.
Ultimately, Think of Your Content as a Journey, Not a Set of Boxes
When you first start building your brand, it’s easy to fall into the mindset that your content has to fit into neat little boxes. Pick a niche. Select a few topics. Stick to them forever. But that’s not how life works — and it’s not how the people you admire are doing it, either.
Emma Chamberlain started as a chaotic teenage YouTuber doing vlogs from her bedroom. Now she’s a fashion icon, podcast host (Anything Goes), brand ambassador for Louis Vuitton, and founder of Chamberlain Coffee. Her brand evolved as she evolved—and her audience followed because it felt real.
Brene Brown was known first for her TED Talk on vulnerability, then as an academic and author. She’s since stepped into podcasting, leadership coaching, and cultural commentary. Her content spans research, personal stories, and current events — all deeply tied to her own experiences, growth and values.
Tinx (Christina Najjar) grew a following on TikTok sharing “rich mom” content and lighthearted hot takes. But she’s transitioned into a podcast host, brand partner, and lifestyle voice of her generation. Her content shifts with her life, and her audience is loyal because of it.
So instead of thinking of your content as a set of fixed categories, think of it as the unfolding story of your life in real time.
Right now, you might be in a season that has its own natural "theme": getting married, moving across the country, starting a new business, getting laid off, paying off credit card debt, etc. It feels like a niche, but really, it’s just the season of life you’re in. It’s the part of your story you're living and sharing right now. And when that season shifts — when you move again, or fall in love, or launch something new — you bring your audience along for the next chapter. They aren’t just following a topic. They’re following you.
When you build your brand this way, you leave room for growth. You leave room for change. You build a brand that’s alive, because it moves as you move.
For Anyone Feeling Stuck or Stifled
If you’re in a season where niching down once felt right, but now it feels heavy... you're not doing anything wrong. Choosing to become the niche — to let your life and your energy be the thread that ties everything together — is riskier. When you are the niche, you cannot hide behind a topic or a genre. It’s you. It’s your life. And that level of visibility can feel vulnerable. It asks more of you, and requires a deeper kind of self-trust. It’s not the right path for everyone — and that’s okay.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to building a personal brand. But if you feel like choosing a single niche is starting to cost you your creativity, your excitement, your joy... it might be time to try something different.
And just so you know — no matter how you build your brand, you’re going to experience lulls. There have been months where I gained tens of thousands of followers, and months where I lost thousands. That’s normal. That’s part of the rhythm. It’s not a sign you’re failing. It’s not a sign you need to burn it all down and start over. It’s just the nature of this path.
You can’t do this wrong — as long as you keep showing up.
Ready to grow your audience without niching down?
If you’re ready to post what you actually want to post, to create without limits, and to build a brand rooted in who you really are — I’d love to invite you to join my community, Personal Brand Accelerator (PBA) for a free trial, or apply to work together one-on-one.
You don’t have to figure this out alone. In fact — it’s a lot easier when you don’t.
