From bird content to mahjong: 5 ridiculously niche creators making serious money

In 2023, a Twitter account I'd never heard of mentioned the dealership software I was selling.

A light switch flipped. Suddenly our outbound team had something to call behind, and inbound leads started stacking up in the CRM. I made the two biggest paychecks of my life in back-to-back months and won a sales trip that let me take clients out of the country.

Ninety days after that tweet, I was running the business side of the account building the products, the workflows, the go-to-market, and selling and onboarding every client myself.

I've been doing a version of that ever since: matching audiences with things they can sell. A training company built around a car salesman on TikTok. A wave forecast app for famous surfers on YouTube. Same question every time, what will this audience actually buy?

So I asked my team to scour the internet for the strangest people selling the most obscure things to the most specific audiences.

Here's what they found.

— Freddy

I couldn't sleep last night thinking about a guy who makes nearly six figures writing a newsletter for magicians.

Former TV magic writer. Weekly illusion guides, industry news, deep dives. Thousands of subscribers pay him to unlock the premium stuff.

From there I fell down a rabbit hole.

There's a guy on LinkedIn clearing several hundred thousand selling vintage lacrosse t-shirts to private equity lawyers. There's a woman on Twitch making a killing sitting on camera painting birds.

That's the power of a niche audience. You don't need millions of followers. You need a small, fanatical group and something real to sell them.

Lara’s Mahjong Edit has built an audience of over 100k followers, teaching American Mahjong, a game I that exists to rile up my grandma and her friends at the country club now that they are too old for tennis.

Lara sells strategy and mastery guides, workshops, one-on-one consultations, teaching materials, and access to a membership program called the Confidence Club. 

In other words, she has found multiple ways to monetize the exact same person as they move from “what do these tiles do?” to “I have strong opinions about Charleston strategy.”

That’s a pretty great business. The audience comes to her because they want to learn one difficult, specific thing, and every step deeper into the hobby creates another problem she can help solve.

Andrew Rea built Binging with Babish around a very specific internet compulsion: watching somebody recreate food from movies and TV. 

That includes everything from Kevin’s chili in The Office to the wildly impractical Krabby Patty that thousands of people agreed absolutely needed to exist in real life.

Whatever deranged meal a cartoon character ate once in 1997… Rea would figure out how to make it.

Babish now has cookbooks, branded products, a podcast, and a paid community with exclusive recipes, livestreams, classes, and other content.

And on top of that, major retailers like Target and Walmart stock his cookware collection online and in stores.

But what I like about Babish is how little he had to wander from the original idea. He found a weird corner of food culture that millions of people loved, then kept building things for those same people. No inspirational pivot into wellness and no crypto rug-pulls. Just an elaborate commercial empire built around fictional food.

OG Slimes A channel that figured out how to monetize AMSR videos.

They sell brightly colored, aggressively scented, extremely tactile slime that children (and adults) desperately want.

But interestingly, the company sells out constantly and has managed to turn weekly restocks into something closer to sneaker drops. Fans wait diligently by their phones every Friday for new textures, scents, and limited releases, like collaborations with Barbasol, Tru Fru, and the NBA.

Somewhere along the line, slime developed a collector economy. I’m as surprised as you are.

Liz Clayton Fuller paints birds. More specifically, she paints wonderfully odd, whimsical birds like owls, pigeons, mallards, and finches. She streams the process on Twitch to 40k followers who apparently find this kind of thing very relaxing.

So, I checked out Liz’s storefront, and it was eye-opening. She sells original paintings, prints, shirts, stickers, and other merchandise, offers products wholesale through Faire, and even partnered with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology on a $100 self-paced course about nature journaling and field sketching.

There’s something wonderfully stubborn about the whole business. A conventional growth consultant would probably tell her to broaden into “nature content” or “creative lifestyle.” Instead, she kept going deeper into birds… I mean, I get it.

That is objectively funnier and probably smarter.

Lyle Forever puts on a gecko costume, takes calls from strangers, and talks to them about whatever is happening in their lives.

That’s pretty much it.

Therapy Gecko started as a livestream during COVID and somehow grew into a major podcast, a merchandise business, paying subscribers, an exclusive global advertising sales deal with SiriusXM, and live comedy shows around the country.

The premise sounds like something invented at 2:13 a.m. by three stoner roommates. Yet it works because the conversations are funny, strange, occasionally touching, and almost impossible to confuse with anything else on the internet.

And now people buy theater tickets to watch a man dressed as a lizard talk to strangers about their problems.

This insomnia-fueled Google deep-dive changed how I think about audience size.

Collectively, we spend an enormous amount of time talking about reach because reach is easy to measure. Followers go up, impressions go up, and everybody gets a nice chart for the quarterly meeting.

But these businesses make their money from something much harder to put on a dashboard: customer passion.

And the stranger the niche gets, the easier the economics sometimes become. You know exactly who you’re talking to, what they care about, what they already spend money on, and what would make them come back.

And once that relationship is strong enough, monetization stops being limited to advertising.

The audience becomes the distribution layer.

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