DaedTech

Stories about Software

Nov
4

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What Are Your Niche Ideas? Let’s Do Some Case Studies

Category: Business of Freelancing | 6 Comments

My last post here was about niches.  That’s an important topic to cover before I can give you meaningful content about marketing.  As I’ve said before, marketing without a niche is just you blathering about yourself into the void.

I’ve talked about niches a lot, in the past.  And I also receive a TON of reader questions about them, often in the abstract sense:

  • How do I pick a niche?  (You don’t — you discover one and opt to fill it).
  • What kind of niche can I fill with this skill set?
  • How do I move away from being a generalist?

Those are totally valid questions.  But they’re hard for me to answer in a satisfying way, because they’re so individually specific.

This is a Topic Best Tackled Via Case Study

So let’s remedy that by making the questions specific.

I recently published a new video to my YouTube channel.  You can see that here:

Unlike my normal reader question round-ups, I dedicated the whole video to answering a single question.  And this one more or less boiled down to a question of finding a niche, but with some specifics.

This particular reader already had a side hustle generating recurring monthly revenue, so I talked at length about how valuable that is.  My suggestion for that particular case was to really dig into why this client paid and use that as the basis for trying to replicate and scale that side hustle into just a hustle.

The question setup lacked specifics around the actual arrangement, so it was still a little general.  But I think this is the conceptual basis for something that could help us finally boil the niche ocean.

Let’s Dig into Your Niche Ideas

It has now been 6 and a half years since I was someone’s employee.  I spent about half that time as a solo consultant, and the second half establishing and growing Hit Subscribe, where I’m currently the CEO of a rapidly growing (and actively hiring) business.

This field experience has probably given me the applied equivalent of an MBA.  But more importantly, it has exposed me to a shipping barge’s worth of niches and niche ideas.  And it has equipped me to do a decent job of evaluating them.

This is where you come in, if you’d like.  Send me an idea you have for a niche, and I’ll take a look at it, offer my thoughts, and give tips for how to make it work.

You can email me at erik at daedtech or submit through the ask page.

If you’re worried about giving away your big idea, that’s your prerogative, but I wouldn’t sweat that.  Ideas are cheap, and the thing standing between a current employee and a successful business is never the idea.

But, on the positive side, I’m happy to help.  And I think this could be the path to having good fodder for how to find and validate niches, and how to do some marketing as well.

So fire away with your questions about niches, if you’re so inclined.

Oct
26

By

You Don’t Pick Niches — You Discover Them

Category: Business of Freelancing | 2 Comments

As I continue along this meandering odyssey of posts about freelancing, I’ve arrived at the point where I should talk about marketing.  After all, I just talked about sales, and then about how not to market.

But the trouble is that, until you pick some kind of niche, your marketing is essentially just platitudinous bullshit.

Marketing is really about making consumers aware of how your offering could (or couldn’t) help them.  What, then, does marketing generalist labor look like?

  • I’m passionate and I believe in quality!
  • I have good communication skills and I believe in under-promising and over-delivering.
  • My credit score is 800!

It quickly descends into the farcical, particularly since there is only one true, accurate piece of generalist marketing: “I’m cheaper than the other people you’re talking to.”

Don’t believe me?  Consider the only two generalist arguments about hourly rates:

  1. I’m the cheapest!
  2. Sure, the other dude is cheaper, but I’m higher quality, which means you’ll actually pay less in the long run, which — plot twist! — actually makes me the cheapest.

So before we can talk about marketing, we need something worth marketing.  We need to get you a niche.

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Oct
12

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In Defense of (Initial) Generalist Freelancing

Category: Business of Freelancing | 4 Comments

As I’ve dripped out this series I’m doing on the business of freelancing, I’ve staked out a pretty aggressive position.  In the very first post, I argued that freelancing is an interim, and not end state.  And I’ve doubled down since then.

Today, however, I’d like to add a little nuance.

If you’ll recall the diagram from that first post, I pointed out that freelancers either figure out business ownership, or else they wind up employees.  (Whether someone else’s employees, or just employees of their own, dead-end freelancing ‘business.’)  Because of this, you might assume that the ideal would be to minimize, or even skip, the freelancing state.

But today I’m going to argue that, no, that’s not necessarily ideal.  The interim freelancing state serves an important risk reduction purpose that a lot of folks (past me included) need. 

So yes, you should definitely enter freelancing with an exit, business-owner state in mind.  But no, I wouldn’t advise skipping it until or unless you thoroughly understand it.

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Sep
30

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To Market Yourself as a Freelance Dev, Stop Posturing for Your Peers

Category: Business of Freelancing |

In my last post, I offered freelancers a primer on sales.  And in that post, I promised to start talking about marketing.

After all, effective marketing — getting buyers to come to you — is the main success driver for effective sales.

But as I laced my fingers, inverted my wrists, and stretched in the universal “I’m about to do stuff” pose, I realized something.  Before we can get started on how you should market, we’re going to need to spend some time unlearning a bad habit.

In fact, an entire post’s worth of time.

The bad habit in question is how you, the freelance developer, LOVE to appeal to the wrong audience.

Specifically, you love to appeal to other software developers — your peers.  You probably give occasional talks at user groups and conferences and have a nice Stack Overflow score.  You’re looking endlessly for semi-objective signposts that make you stand out from the crowd when hiring authorities (or buyers) grade you.

This is a failure pattern.  And I’m going to spend this post beating it out of you.

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Sep
22

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Sales 101 for Freelance Devs — Avoiding the Pain You’re About to Experience

Category: Business of Freelancing | 2 Comments

Back in March, I made a fake tweet for a blog post draft.

It was a blog post about how not to handle a situation where your large, only client (i.e. your salaried employer) abruptly breaks up with you.  But given that the economy collapsed in on itself like a neutron star a week later, the post seemed in poor taste and I never published it.

Still, no sense letting a good fake tweet go to waste.  So I’m going to use it instead for a post about freelance dev sales, which is basically a rounding error away from salaried dev job interviews.

What I’m going to do is walk you through the sales strategies that a dev freelancer will suffer through, in numbered order, before figuring out something that actually works.  I’ll also have a couple of interludes to explain a little bit about sales along the way.  The goal is that hopefully you can skip some of missteps and create a strategy for faster joy.

1. Introduction to Affiliate Sales: The I Just Got Fired Tweet

Here’s something that seemingly every developer tweets at some point in their career:


Usually it has approximately 8 billion retweets and likes, a handful of comments, and, I’d assume, a conversion rate just north of the Planck constant into useful job leads.

Why would I presume that?

Well, because the call to action invites people to do something super easy.  “Smash that retweet button and do your good deed for the day.”  So people do… exactly, and only, that.

And then they call it a day, assuming that someone else down the line will do the actual thing that might help this person.  And, if it ever happened, the “actual thing” would probably be just introducing them to a corporate recruiter or, maybe a dev manager or something.

It’s a classic case of vanity metrics in the world of marketing.  But I want to talk about the sales strategy here.  Let’s save freelancer marketing for another day.

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