My portfolio template competes with 10,000 others. My dentist template competes with ~50.
Both are Next.js, both took similar effort. But niche templates sell on "this understands my business" - appointment booking, service menus, insurance details; not on code quality. Nobody in a dental practice compares your component architecture; they check whether the demo looks like their clinic.
Still at $0 revenue and ~90 store visits, so this is a thesis, not a victory lap. But if I'm right, the niche one breaks zero first. Curious which underserved niches others have found.
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"This understands my business" beating code quality is a sharp way to frame why niche wins, a dentist doesn't care how clean your component structure is, they care that booking and insurance details are already handled for their specific world. $0 revenue at 90 visits isn't a failure yet though, that's still early enough to be reading signal, not proof either way. What's actually happening when someone lands on the dentist template, are they engaging with it and not converting, or bouncing fast?
Your thesis is right and it goes further than templates: specificity is the whole sale. The dentist doesn't buy Next.js, they buy 'this looks like my clinic and has the booking my front desk needs,' so make the demo speak their vocabulary down to the insurance details. Distribution follows the same rule, one post in a dental practice-management group beats competing with 10,000 portfolio templates on a marketplace.
What's interesting isn't that the dentist template has fewer competitors—it's that specialization changes how buyers evaluate the product. I'd keep validating whether customers choose your templates because they're niche, or because they immediately recognize their own business in the demo without having to imagine the fit.