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

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.

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John Peden
3 years ago

Hey Erik, I read Developer Hegemony, passed it on to a junior I work with and have been giving some serious thought to niching down over the past few weeks/months. I have a couple of niches that seem promising and would love your thoughts. Happy to share on here…ideas are cheap, as you say. End-to-end test consultancy. I’m a freelance front-end dev based in the UK. I’ve had 3 large clients since 2016 and while each project was a replatforming app dev job I’m struggling to identify any common themes other than a lack of E2E testing. Everyone agreed it… Read more »

Erik Dietrich
3 years ago
Reply to  John Peden

I’m glad to hear that this thread of content is resonating — thanks for letting me know. And I’ve added the ideas (both the ones that interest you and the nays) to the backlog. Some interesting stuff to mull over, BTW. “I make recruiters suck less” would be a pretty memorable tagline for someone, if not necessarily you 🙂

John Peden
3 years ago
Reply to  Erik Dietrich

Haha, thanks Erik. Look forward to getting your thoughts on the above.

I’d be happy to pay you for a bit of time one-on-one to help me figure this out if that’s an option?

Joe Garecht
3 years ago

Honing in on your niche is super important to your success. When I first started out as a consultant, I was focused on trying to serve everyone. That makes marketing impossible… you need to know exactly who you are serving and what you are offering if you want to be able to effectively market your services.

Thanks for the reminder and for this great post!

Erik Dietrich
3 years ago
Reply to  Joe Garecht

Very well stated. And thanks for the feedback/kind words!