Picking a niche for your service or freelance business is perhaps one of the most important things you can do in order to maximize the chances of your success.
Working in a niche will allow you to differentiate your services easier and stand out among the completition of generalists and jack-of-all-trades.
Let’s compare the two styles of work and you’ll see the difference.
As a generalist:
As generalist you’ll have larger volumes of work, but competition will be higher as many other generalists will be able to accomplish the same tasks as you, and will try to win the same projects as you.
The higher market saturation results in more people applying for the same projects and jobs, which means employers will have a larger pool of talent to choose from which is great for them, but not for you because that lowers your chances of winning a project against someone with more experience or lower costs than you.
As a generalist, you’ll also suffer from low work and project quality as the businesses and their owners would most likley be unexperienced and unrefeined as leaders and business managers.
As a specialist:
Making the conscious descision to specalize in specific tasks that require more experience / knowledge in a certain topic will intrisicly lower your competition as less people will have your specific experience and understanding of the subject matter which also happens to be the strognest value proposition for a specialist that any smart business manager should be looking for. This is also the reason that you’ll be able to charge higher prices for your work.
As a specialist your clients will be more refined as businesses and managment which will make your day to day work more enjoyable, while their deeper understanding of the industry and services they operate in will make your specific subject matter opinion highly valued which will allow you to build trust and longlasting relationships easier.
OK, enough about that, we’ve compared both, but how do you accomplish that in real-life? Well here’s how I did it with my own freelance work.
There’s a few things you should take into account and will give you a clear indication on the direction you can take your work in.
Specialize
- Do things that are specific enough e.g — Cold Email Marketing, Architecture Design, Mobile UX/UI desing.
- Do not generalize — Marketing, Software Development, Design
Pick a market that is big enough, but specialized enough.
- Pick a market that is big enough to sustain a regular influx of work, but is not specilized to the point where it’s too small e.g — SaaS companies, Fintech apps, Electric Vehicle Design.
- Do not go to narrow e.g — Pineaple Pizza Making Companies, Fintech apps using Palestine pounds.
Ideally — something that you enjoy
- Pick something that you enjoy doing and find interesting and you’re passionate about, that way you’ll spend time doing things that matter to you.
Here’s how this looked for me when I started specalizing
What I do is Product Marketing & Growth Manager for SAAS companies.
Where:
Product & Growth Marketing
- Specialization that is a wide practice, but is narrow enough at the same time, everythng that is marketing, but only for products.
SaaS companies
- A market that is big enough — SaaS companies, a big market in the software industry, but is a segment of it.
That’s it, good luck on your adventures!
