My portfolio template competes with 10,000 others. My dentist template competes with ~50.

great

The pricing point above is right, but there's a second reason niche wins that's worth testing directly: the buyer's search query.

Someone shopping for a portfolio template types "portfolio template". Someone running a clinic types something with a proper noun in it - their practice management software, their booking system, their specialty. Proper nouns are where competition collapses. It isn't just that the dental niche has 50 competitors instead of 10,000; it's that the query itself has already told you what the buyer needs, so the demo either matches or it doesn't, and code quality never enters the decision.

I've been screening YouTube channels for the same effect and it's stark. The generic version of a tutorial - "how to steam milk" - competes with every creator alive. The same tutorial pinned to one specific espresso machine model pulls roughly 84 views for every subscriber the channel has, because the person searching a model number has already decided to buy something.

So on "which underserved niches": I'd look for niches with a proper-noun vocabulary. Trades and clinics that run on named software, hobbies organised around named equipment, professions with named certifications. If the buyer's world has jargon you'd have to look up, the template can encode that jargon and nobody generic can compete with you on it.

And on Faseeh's question, which is the one I'd answer first - at 90 visits you can't read conversion, but you can read whether the dentist demo holds attention longer than the portfolio one. That's the cheapest early signal you've got.

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.