Be yourself, not a niche

It's not because you have a niche that you're lying to yourself and the others. Or that you're not yourself.

Let's say I'm a software developer for 20 years. I've seen more and more companies struggling to measure the quality of their codebase. I tried to help many of them, gained some experience, automated my processes. I decided that it would be my niche.

1. It gives me credibility. It's better to be the guy who knows how to measure the quality of a codebase than the jack-of-all-trade people hire to do monkey job (coding as fast as possible useless functionalities).
2. I have less competitors. I don't compete against one million others putting the same boring generalities on their CV / landing page / whatever.
3. I've automated my processes: I can do the work quicker, and if I'm not payed by the hour but by the task, I'll get way more money that way.

What you really mean is people who follow some trends. Well, in that case, I would agree with you; but it's not always true. Community is a big trend right now, but the underlying concept is powerful and will always be. The ones who understand that will thrive even when the idea of the trendy community will disappear, because they never really embraced the trend, but the underlying and profound idea.

Let's take indie hackers. It's just my opinion, but I don't think this community is building on some specific trends, like the Saas trend for example. We thrive on the concept underlying it: being your own boss, and the freedom which comes from it. The idea and dream of freedom will never die, but I'm pretty sure nobody will care about building Saas at one point. It will be something else.

That’s sort of the route I’ve taken with my newsletter. I keep it quite personal, talking about what’s been happening to me each week, good and bad, share my blog posts, then all the links I collected from around the web.

There is a sort of a niche: javascript, tech and web development. I’d been posting links to my linkblog for close to 10 years before the newsletter, and they are the main topics I ended up gravitating towards. I guess there’s the possibility they might evolve over time, but that’s not something I think about at all at the minute.

I currently just use my name as the name of the newsletter because I didn’t have anything better and I just wanted to get going. Maybe in the future I’ll come up with a cool name, but at least I’m doing it now. I just published the 11th weekly edition yesterday!

Does this apply to say, managing a startup Twitter account, as well? Or should that be kept dry and straight to the point?

You can do both, at least that's what I try to do. I tweet about how I see marketing and that's often very different from how other people see it.

Thank you for sharing this.

Although I've always believed in being/sharing your authentic self is more impactful than conforming to a niche, it's nice to hear someone else say it. Makes me feel less crazy