Skip the Side Quests
In my opinion, it's really hard to be great at a bunch of different things at once. I work with a lot of investing creators, and lately I keep seeing the same pattern. Someone makes incredible content, builds a loyal audience that keeps growing month over month, and then, because everything is so easy to build now, they start branching out into other verticals.
It usually starts innocently with a Substack. The first issue does great, but over time the posts get longer, start reading like AI slop, and open rates slowly drift down. It isn't making much money, and it's quietly pulling focus away from the content that got them there in the first place.
The next step is usually a vibe-coded investing tool, built with something like Lovable or Claude. The audience signs up and the hype is real at first, but it's a team of one or two trying to keep up. Bugs start showing up, the support inbox fills with questions that go unanswered, and nothing gets fixed as fast as it should. On top of that, good financial data is incredibly expensive, so a lot of these tools just scrape it from around the internet. That's not how it works, and wrong numbers in an investing tool are about the fastest way to lose someone's trust.
Then there's security, which is the part almost nobody thinks about. If you aren't really a professional developer, you probably don't know where the holes are, and the AI that wrote the code won't always tell you. Nowadays it isn't uncommon for well-established companies to spend many hours every week just hardening their security, and even then things slip through. A creator shipping a side project with their audience's emails, passwords and sometimes payment info inside it is taking on a lot more risk than they realize, and one leak can undo years of trust overnight.
So now the audience has had an underwhelming newsletter and a buggy tool they were excited about, and they don't feel the same way about the creator as they once did. Meanwhile, the thing they were actually great at isn't getting the attention it used to. Without really meaning to, they've started to hurt themselves.
The creators I work with who have the most success are mostly all in on one thing, the platform that has served them best. They don't spin out and go on a bunch of side quests. They keep making what their audience showed up for and keep getting better at it, and when they want to give their audience a tool, they partner with one that already has the team, support and data behind it. Just something to think about.
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