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 is such an underrated strategy! Niche positioning is an absolute game-changer. I recently realized this too while building templates. When I made a generic portfolio page, no one cared. But when I focused on dedicated, lightweight builders for specific niches like NGOs, Real Estate, and Insurance, the engagement went up instantly.
These micro-niches have so much less competition, and clients are actually looking for tailored solutions rather than another generic template. Thanks for sharing this insight, it completely validates what I'm currently working on!
The pricing side of your thesis deserves a test too. A portfolio template gets compared to 10,000 other templates, so it's priced like a commodity. A dentist template gets compared to what the clinic would otherwise pay a local agency, which is a four figure quote and a few weeks of waiting. Same Next.js underneath, totally different reference price. I did side client work for small businesses for years and not one of them shopped by stack. They shopped by how fast they could stop thinking about the problem.
So if the niche one breaks zero first, don't only read that as a volume win. Try raising the price before adding more niches. 50 competitors plus a buyer whose alternative is an agency quote leaves you a lot of room.
"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.