Following my last post, I could have gone in a few different directions, but I’ve opted to write on the subject of niches. After all, I’m nothing, if not a man of the people.
(Actually, that’s probably a terrible way to describe myself, but I’m going to try not to get too off the rails, too quickly, here).
So let’s talk about niches. I’m no longer going to ask you to believe me, axiomatically, that it’s better to get away from being a generalist as fast as you can. I’m going to build my case in this post.
There’s a Lot of Generic Niche Advice Out There. Don’t Worry About That Advice.
I did some extensive research to see if anyone had some good arguments in favor of niching for freelancers. And, by “extensive research,” I mean I did this Google search.
Then I braced myself for the onslaught of people hawking “I’ll teach you to freelance” info-products and dug in. Yes, I braved the pop-up email capture forms and squeeze pages so that you don’t have to.
After the gigantic rant I queued up last time, I’m going to resume instructional content in this business of freelancing series. I think I’ve driven home the importance of reasoning about profit and I’ve introduced you to some business models to think about.
So let’s focus on actually hanging out your shingle and getting started.
Now, I don’t actually think you really need a website to start. But a lot of people and most of you reading would probably disagree. “How can you start a business without a website?!”
I frankly don’t care enough to argue the point. So let’s just move on and assume that you’re going to build one, whether you need it or not.
First, The Ugly: What You’re Probably About to Do If I Don’t Stop You
Alright, let’s take inventory of where you are. Just getting started, you have no clients or case studies, no testimonials or past history of business. So all of those things are out for including in your website.
As for your services… well, app dev, right? People give you requirements and you code ’em up and deploy that code that the world may bask in its well-crafted glory. Nothing much to really say there, either?
But you can’t just say nothing…
Here It Comes: The Platitudes, Cookie-Cutter Methodologies, and Life Stories
No, saying nothing won’t fly, so you decide to talk about yourself, your approach, and your philosophies in glowing, rambling terms. Oh, and in the plural of course.
Here at DogFood Inc, we strongly believe in integrity, work ethic, customers and decency. These foundational principles infuse everything that we do!
We start by having a meeting with you where we listen to all of your needs. You can think of this as gathering your requirements. We then enter what we like to call the design phase, where we bring our unique architectural experience to bear in designing your app.
Next comes implementation, where we make sure to use all of the latest design patterns and best practices. Then comes a rigorous round of testing, and finally hand-off, where we ask you to participate in our patent-pending user acceptance test process.
You may find yourself wondering why we’re named DogFood Inc. Good question! It all started 10 years ago with our founder and CEO’s dog, Spud. You see Spud…
{blah, blah, blah}
And so because of Spud, and because we believe in the practice of “dogfooding” by building every tool we use from scratch, Dogfood Inc was born! Let us take a bite out of your software needs!
Come on. You know you were going to write something like this. At least you were before I made you all self-conscious about it.
Don’t worry, I’m sure I wrote some similar drivel when I first hung out my own shingle 10 or more years ago. Years of suffering the incumbent indignities of resumes and cover letters fill us to the brim with BS, to the extent that it keeps spewing from us even as we leave that world behind.
If you’re on my mailing list, you probably saw that I just announced a new podcast on which I’m a panelist. The title, not coincidentally to this post series, is “The Business of Freelancing.”
So what are you to make of me having a podcast that dispenses advice for freelancers and writing a blog post telling you not to take freelancing advice from freelancers? Do I need to channel Doc Holliday in Tombstone?
Apparently, my hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Well, no, I hope. I like to think that, after a bit of nuance, I’m right both times. But whether that’s true or not, I can at least stake a claim to logical consistency.
Freelancers and Business Owners
In the initial post I wrote for the series, I created a distinction between freelancers and business owners. The latter reasons about business profit, whereas the former does not.
In that same post, I also introduced this image, sketching two career paths, stating that “freelancer” is just an intermediate step along one of two roads.
Put succinctly, the freelancer either starts to reason about profit and grows a sustainable business or else they simply wind up an employee again. I overcame the “but I know a freelancer that’s been doing it for 15 years” objection by pointing out that “employee” doesn’t necessarily mean being someone else’s employee.
In another post in the series, I talked about the duality of the freelancer’s role as an “owner-operator.” The endless freelancer is (technically) both a shareholder and the only employee of a business that earns no profit.
But they in no way behave like the shareholder and owner, so that becomes an unoccupied, vestigial role. They focus, instead, on the technician aspects of their employee role — delivering website wireframes or code or whatever.
Think for a moment about what this means, if you look at their role from a career advancement perspective.
The freelancer is the sole employee of a business with disinterested, absentee ownership and no plans for profit. For any employee, career advancement depends entirely on one of two situations: business growth or changing jobs.
The indefinite freelancer can have neither possible outcome, so all that remains is perpetual employment in a dead-end business.
I haven’t done a digest post in a while, so let’s do that. But first, I’ll digress a little bit with a more abbreviated version of “notes from the road” than the last one.
Notes from the Road
We are currently back at our home in Michigan.
It’s a nice place to be, particularly in the summer. And it’s good to get home, dump the boats in the lake, and enjoy the outdoors.
But, it was nice to get away for a while, especially to the non-coastal west. Out there, things were more wide-open, more normal-feeling when doing outdoors activities, and less virus/lockdown-focused.
Between the last notes from the road post and now, we spent a month in a town called Hailey, Idaho, and then a little more than a week in Bismarck, ND, before drifting back here over a long weekend.
If you’ve read my last post and have been following my business of freelancing series, then you either took the red pill or the blue pill after the last post. Full disclosure: I’m not sure which pill is which. But let’s assume you took whichever color corresponded to “I want to stop selling hours of labor and not become a managing director.”
You’re going to move toward profit and away from hourly billing.
That’s all well and good, but you’re going to need to know what to do instead. What should set your sights on as a new business model?
I am Erik Dietrich, founder of DaedTech. I’m a former programmer, architect, and IT management consultant, and current founder and CEO of Hit Subscribe.
Developer Hegemony
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