I'd say, like almost anything, "it's complicated and there are tradeoffs".<p>Niching improves efficiency. It makes it easier to communicate your value proposition, find clients that are a good fit, makes it easier to get-up-to-speed on new projects, and ensures you can deliver on the projects you take on. If you're ever going to do a "productized service", you kind-of need to have a niche.<p>On the flip side, niching reduces the total market size of your customers (e.g. can't fulfill requests for mobile apps if you're a WordPress shop), makes it more difficult to transition to other domains if you're trying to get a job (pigeonholing is real), and it's boring to do the same tech or industry forever (personal opinion).
Depends on what you're optimizing for. This post is about being at the beginning of your freelancing career when you're trying to figure out what's going to keep you going. I found that after 13 years of consulting I finally pick a niche. When I did marketing, sales conversations, and execution became a lot easier, and effective hourly rate skyrocketed.<p>Picking a niche is smart if you know it'll sustain you on the dimensions that matter (emotionally, financially, intellectually, etc).
I wonder if anyone has niched down not into a vertical, but into a demographic. For example a lot of my clients are religious CEO's. And I'm contemplating just trying to niche into that demographic as opposed to an actual industry or vertical.
Having a niche is a good way to get your first and probably second promotion. Be good at a thing, get promoted to senior person of thing, maybe manager of thing. At this point you don’t want to be a specialist anymore if your goal is promotion. You want to be a generalist and know how things generally should work and be a good communicator. It helps if you are likable. The switch is hard. It is hard to give up what you are good at and hard to get people to see you are good at other things.
> I think the pressure and emphasis on having a niche is unfounded. Especially if you’re in the first few years of your freelancing career and especially if a niche hasn’t made itself apparent to you.<p>I have found this to be the case. Niches are a hindsight thing a lot of the time. Sometimes it's helpful to hear "stop dealing with problem X since these are a time suck for you", but hearing "find a niche" before you have the problems in front of you isn't all that useful.
I don't know about anyone else, but I <i>have</i> to have a niche, because there is so much to learn. I learn something new, every single day, and I am still barely treading water, in my niche.
I don't know. If anything, I feel generalism is overrated, at least on places like HN. Maybe I've got very limited viewpoint, but I haven't experienced this sentiment of appreciation towards niches. And in the industry what companies seem to want is mostly fullstack devops people that do everything and can adapt to any tech stack, instead of any particular specialists.