There's No Such Thing as a General Audience
"General audience" is a comforting fiction. It promises you can make something valuable without it meaning anything to anyone in particular. You can't.
We reach for it because it feels safe. Name a specific person, and you risk being wrong about them, or worse, being right and having them shrug anyway. Keep it general, and nobody can reject you, because nobody was ever really addressed. The brief says "professionals 25 to 45." The deck says "anyone who wants to grow." The landing page says "for teams of all sizes." Each is a small act of hedging, and each one drains the work of the only thing that could have made it land.
Meaning is always specific and embodied. There is no generic meaning. It only ever lands for someone, somewhere, in a body, with a particular history and a particular eye. A song means something because of the summer you first heard it. A chair means something because your grandmother sat in one like it. A sentence in a book means something because it names what you've been circling for years without words. Strip out the someone, and you don't get universal meaning. You get none.
And meaning is the engine of all decision. Every choice a person makes runs on what something means to them, not on its general utility. People don't buy the fastest laptop. They buy the one that fits the story of who they're becoming. They don't hire the most credentialed consultant. They hire the one who seemed to understand the problem the way they feel it. Utility is table stakes. Meaning makes the decision.
Meaning drives decisions. Therefore meaning is economic value. Not a proxy for it, but the actual substance of it. The voice, the aesthetic, and the point of view aren't decoration on top of the offer. Most of the time, they are the offer.
This bursts the general-audience bubble. Generic utility is a commodity, and commodities race to zero. If anyone could make what you make for anyone, the only lever left is price, and price only moves in one direction. Meaning is the only thing with a margin because you can't swap it out. The person it was made for can tell the difference.
AI made generic utility essentially free. The baseline competent answer, the serviceable copy, the fine-enough design: infinite supply now, available to everyone, at no cost. Whatever was valuable because it was merely competent just lost its price. That isn't a forecast. It's this quarter's reality for anyone who writes, designs, advises, or teaches for a living.
So the only scarce and defensible thing left is the specific. Talking to actual people with an actual aesthetic. Holding a real point of view, one you're willing to be wrong about in public. Making something a particular kind of person encounters and recognizes as theirs. AI doesn't threaten that work. It's the thing that makes that work the only work left worth paying for.
Which means the risk calculation has flipped. Being specific used to feel dangerous, because you might exclude someone. Now being general is the danger, because the general version already exists, and it's free. The narrow thing is the safe bet. The person who says "this is for second-time founders tired of performing certainty" will find their people. The person who says "this is for everyone" is competing with a machine that never sleeps and never charges.
The whole of economics is communication. Prices, offers, products, hires: all of it is people telling each other what matters and deciding whether they agree. Communication without a recipient isn't communication. It's broadcasting into a void and calling the silence a market.
So the best thing you can do right now is to stop asking "who is my audience" and start asking "for whom is this unmistakably meant." Then make it for them, and let everyone else overhear.