White vinegar from The Vinegar Company.
It’s boring af but everyone needs vinegar and the branding is on point.
The world tries to make you into the vinegar company.
Social media advice tells you to pigeonhole yourself into a small niche and keep doing that all the time.
Book writing advice tells you to stick to one genre and be the book vinegar guy, some familiar brand that people instantly associate with you.
First of all, that is so boring. Even the supposed minimalistic apple products also came in a lot of colours and variants.
You’d think they only sold iPads but in truth they have about 100 products apart from their flagship.
People keep telling me I should stick to one thing, that what I do is confusing, writing, art, bitcoin, AI, business, it’s all too much to keep up. They want to see my profile and see one thing, I assume sci-fi books? And that’s it.
But the real world is not specialized and neat like that.
Like Heinlein said, specialization is for ants.
I’m not the vinegar guy.
I’m a polymath who needs an entire page just to list his skills.
It’s good to be the vinegar guy. Heck I’d love to have a break out career like Andy Weir who is the hard sci-fi guy who wrote the Martian and the Project Hail Mary. I’d love to be pigeonholed into one category that makes lots of money and makes me famous and beloved by fans.
But that’s a lottery ticket. A tiny fraction of creators get to have that.
The rest of us need to grind, iterate a ton of ideas, and finally something might stick.
Everyone who tells you that you need to focus on one thing means well but they have no clue what they’re talking about.
Being the vinegar guy is okay because people need vinegar. There’s demand.
What demand is there for sci-fi books? For AI tools? You don’t know. You have to try. You assume people need this, you spend years making it and it flops.
Because nobody really knows what people want.
The big corporations like to pretend they know but recent flops like Metaverse, Oculus and the Supergirl movie show that they don’t have a fucking clue what sells.
But they can afford to waste endless piles of money trying to make a flawed product work in the market.
We don’t. We can run ads, sure, but how much money can you really spend on something that doesn’t get any momentum?
So we try things, we see which ones get traction, and double down on that.
All successful creators have an endless graveyard of projects and ideas.
@levelsio has some 100+ projects I think before getting to one that actually sells like crazy.
He became the vinegar guy after trying out 100 different liquids people might need.
Do you get my point? I’ve heard the “advice” focus on one thing many times in my life. Okay, fine. Focus on what? Tell me what the hot topic is and I’ll focus on it. AI? What about it? Sell saas? Some gpt wrapper? Courses, selling get rich quick schemes?
Is that what you want me to double down on?
No.
I’m a creator and an educator. What I work on will be something I like.
Good thing I like many things, right?
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