DaedTech

To Find a Niche, Learn Why Your Company Pays Your Salary

My belief in picking a niche for yourself becomes obvious to anyone who reads more than a post or two here.  I’ve written too many posts about it to list, and I talk about it on my Youtube channel these days.

But today, I’d like to reference a couple of specific posts where I talk about this in order to flesh out a concept.  Here are those posts.

1. Just under 2 years ago, I wrote a post about how you could pick a specialty with the help of your resume.  My advice was to look at the “key accomplishments” sections and start brainstorming with those.
2. Earlier this year, I wrote a post about picking a niche.  And, in that post, I distinguished between generalizing, specializing, and niching.  Specializing involves looking at your own skill set, picking something you like, and hoping people want to pay for it.  Niching involves looking at needs that others have and filling those needs.

Here’s the gist of what I want to talk about today.  2 years ago, I gave advice that would indeed help you pick a specialty.

But, I actually think that it’s, at best, locally maximizing advice to help you pick a niche.  So I’d like to course correct a bit with my advice to the countless people that ask me for help finding a niche.

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Celebrating Software as a Tactic, Not a Profession

As you may recall, a few weeks back, I offered the hypothesis that software is a business tactic, rather than a profession.  My main purpose in writing that post was to level set a bit with my desired direction for the blog, leaning toward an increase emphasis on reader questions.  And, you all immediately obliged, so thanks for that!

So, I’ll start by responding to people’s questions/reactions to that post, both in comments and through other media.  The follow-up questions/thoughts that I’ll address fall largely into 2 buckets:

1. How do you reconcile “software as a business tactic” with “software as an end,” particularly an aesthetic one, such as with video games?
2. Maybe software is a business tactic and isn’t currently a profession, but why shouldn’t it be?

Number (1) is easier and chronologically first, so let’s do that.

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Those Who Can’t, Sell Tutorials on How You Can

I have a vision for what I want DaedTech (and myself) never to be.  I never want to have the “I made it, and so can you by following these [N] easy steps!” vibe, in any way.  If you ever catch me doing that, please gather with your pitchforks and storm my gate.

Here’s the thing.  Success is hard, specific, and custom to your own context.  But a lot of people don’t let that stop them from hawking it in $99 info products.

Fake It ’til You Make It… as an Expert?

I’m about to describe what I think of as an anti-pattern in the knowledge economy.  You’ve probably experienced this at least subconsciously, if you haven’t yet learned to actively recognize it.

This crystallized in my head recently when I signed up for something called “The Dynamite Circle” (it’s a community for established digital nomad-leaning entrepreneurs).  I was poking around and noticed this blog post, with a couple of great turns of phrase.

In describing a pre-quit-your-job, would-be lifestyle designer, they said:

You are buying products from blogs that make a little money on how to make a little money with your blog.

That produced almost a spit take from me, because I can picture this exact thing.  And so, probably, can you.  It has:

• An oversize photo of the site proprietor smiling maniacally
• Some polished-but-somehow-budget graphics
• The typical “hero journey” landing page layout
• And assurances that you, too, can make money through affiliate marketing, quit your job, and earn passively on a beach in Bali.

But, if you dig into any of the public metrics around the site, you see that it’s getting very little traffic.  What you’ve really got here is someone writing blog posts from a cubicle on their lunch break about how you can follow their lead to a beach in Bali.

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