Going wide too early brings an audience that doesn't believe your depth. Your first year should be about establishing expertise, not reach.
Source: This insight comes from Caleb Ralston's consultation with Taki Moore. Caleb is the content strategist behind Gary Vee and the Hormozis for 16 years.
The instinct is understandable. You want to grow quickly, so you make content that appeals to the broadest possible audience. Viral topics, trending formats, whatever gets the most eyeballs fastest.
The problem isn't that this fails. The problem is that it works, but in the wrong way.
Wide content attracts a wide audience. An audience that showed up for the broad appeal, not for your specific expertise. When you eventually pivot to your actual focus, they're not interested. You've grown a following that doesn't care about what you actually do.
Depth Before Width
"In my opinion, this is not a width play, it's a depth play," Caleb explained. "And I would argue your first year of going hard should be more about depth than width."
Depth content is narrower by definition. It speaks to a specific audience about specific problems. It doesn't chase trends or angle for broad appeal. It demonstrates expertise in a domain, even if that domain is smaller than you'd like.
The math seems worse. Depth content gets fewer views than width content. But the views it gets are from people who are genuinely interested in what you're selling, building, or teaching. They came because of your specific angle, which means they stay when you keep delivering that angle.
Width content does the opposite. High view counts, low relevance. You look successful by the vanity metrics, but the audience isn't actually aligned with your goals.
The Wrong Audience Problem
"A lot of people do the opposite and they try to go ultra wide," Caleb observed. "And then you build an audience that doesn't believe that you have the depth of knowledge that you actually do."
This is the trap. You attract an audience with broad content, then you can't convert them because they never saw your expertise. They think of you as an entertainer, not an authority. When you try to sell something or position yourself as an expert, the audience response doesn't match your actual knowledge level.
You end up having to re-educate an audience you already grew. Or worse, you're stuck making the same broad content forever because that's what your audience expects.
The expert who starts with depth content never has this problem. Their audience found them specifically because of their expertise. The authority is baked into the relationship from day one.
What First-Year Content Should Look Like
If depth is the goal, what does that mean practically?
Narrow your focus. Pick the thing you know better than most people and make content about that specific thing. Not adjacent topics, not broader industry trends, but your actual domain of expertise.
Go deeper than feels necessary. The depth should make broad-audience creators uncomfortable. Content that seems too specialized, too technical, too niche. That's probably about right for establishing expertise.
Accept lower view counts initially. This is the hard part. Your first-year metrics will look worse than if you'd gone wide. But you're building the right foundation instead of the impressive-looking wrong one.
Let expertise show, not credentials. Don't spend time talking about why you're qualified. Demonstrate it through the content itself. The audience should infer your expertise from watching you think, not from hearing you list achievements.
Repeat your core themes. Depth content often means saying the same important things multiple ways, for different situations, at different levels of detail. This isn't repetitive; it's reinforcing your positioning.
The first year is about establishing who you are and what you know. Width comes later, once that foundation is solid.
When to Start Going Wide
There's a timing question: when is the depth foundation solid enough to expand?
The signal is usually internal. When you've established your core positioning so thoroughly that your audience could describe what you do and why you're good at it, the foundation is there.
Other indicators:
Your niche audience is engaged. They comment, they share within their communities, they reference your work to others. This engagement is more valuable than silent view counts.
You're getting opportunities from depth content. Speaking invitations, partnership inquiries, client interest, all coming from people who found your specialized content and wanted more.
You're running out of depth angles. You've covered your core expertise from multiple directions. Continuing to go deeper might cross into diminishing returns.
Your expertise is documented. Someone could look at your content history and quickly understand that you know this domain deeply. The evidence is accumulated.
At that point, going wide makes sense. You have a foundation to expand from, and the wider audience arrives into an existing context of expertise. They see the depth content in your library, which answers the "are they legit?" question before it's even asked.
Width without depth looks like entertainment. Depth followed by width looks like an expert expanding their reach.
