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Years ago, when I was just starting my own business, I worked with a business coach who recommended I niche down and specialize. It was some of the best business advice I ever received, and it also eventually completely killed my joy and felt like golden handcuffs. Today, I wanted to talk about that a bit. Let's dig in! Why nicheAs my business coach, Jonathan Stark, explained, having a niche or specialty is a bit like using a magnifying glass. On it's own, the sun can't start a fire. But directed into a fine point through a magnifying glass, it can turn into a spark that grows into a raging flame. It gives you a "thing" to become the known expert in. It also creates "rolodex moments," where if someone is looking for an expert in {topic}, you become the obvious person to recommend because that's your whole thing. A point of viewAfter a little experimentation, I chose "vanilla JS" as a niche. In my experience, picking a niche in-and-of-itself isn't the game changer. It's picking something that gives you a unique point-of-view. For example, my love of vanilla JS was born out of a frustration with the complexity of other modern approaches, and an advocacy for back-to-basics web development. That resonated with enough people that it helped me grown from a small little blog to a big 10k person plus newsletter and course business. The problem with a nicheThat narrow focus was like rocket fuel on my business. I'm glad I did, and if I could repeat the process, I'd probably have done it again and sooner. But over time, my niche felt stifling. My ADHD brain craves variety and novelty. And for a while, platform-native JavaScript was still providing a lot of it. But after a while, I felt like I'd said everything I needed to say. JavaScript wasn't changing and growing much. Most of the "innovation" (if you can call it that) was in frameworks constantly reinventing themselves, and it all just started to feel boring. And every article I wrote got filtered through the lens of, "is this about my niche," which left me feeling… stifled. I'm Winnie the PoohI very much enjoy bumbling from one delicious pot of honey to the next. I don't really plan where I'm going. I just follow what interests me. Over the years, I've done a lot of seemingly unrelated things. I have a degree in anthropology, a minor in English, and some courses in education. I've worked in HR. I've traveled a lot. I garden. I volunteer at a pet rescue. I love HTML and CSS and JavaScript and PHP. I'm a generalist who cosplayed as a specialist for years, and I felt trapped. Being a generalist means having varied experiences. It means you can connect dots and see patterns specialists might miss. It's also a harder sell. It's not impossible. There are some well-known generalists in our industry. But its playing on hard mode. I'm not sure how to reconcile that two things. The full stack developerI don't love the term, even thought it's probably the best way to describe a generalist skillset in terms that will get you hired. I write passable PHP. I hate Node. The frontend is my jam, but I don't want to write just design system or just JavaScript or just React. I want to do lots of different things. I want to interact with customers and designers and business people and see how all of those parts connect with the code I'm writing. Our industry is, well… industrialized now. And that means it expects most folks to fit in neat little boxes. That kind of sucks! I'm a craftsperson. If you like my writing, you probably are, too. I'd like to think there's still a place for us in the world, though some days it feels less like there is than others. Like this? A Go Make Things membership is the best way to support my work and help me create more free content. Cheers, Want to share this with others or read it later? View it in a browser. |
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