Be better than promos

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? I was listening to a bit of an audio rant inside a community I'm part of, by a designer who runs a really successful one person agency and really what his rant amounted to was:

[00:00:30] You don't have to be for everyone. You don't even have to be for a lot of people. Sometimes you are just for a small group of people, and that small group of people value what you do and how you do it so highly that they're willing to pay you enough money that you don't need to attract the masses. This is the core idea of niching.

[00:00:59] Which is about as popular a concept as weirdly, it is not? And is about as hard to put in practice as it is easy to theoretically understand. Niching requires a lot of patience, and it's about getting razor focussed on exactly who you want to serve and attract. This is not easy. We live in a world that thrives on large numbers, lots of views, lots of likes, lots of followers, lots of clients.

[00:01:36] We want those numbers to be big because as social proof, big numbers are frankly very impressive. And despite knowing that that's not the whole picture, we are still impressed when we see it from others and we still covet having those kinds of numbers for ourselves. It also is one of those things that appears to go against the other very popular piece of advice: about diversification, at least on the surface.

[00:02:11] Diversification says you shouldn't depend on a select few assets to generate your value. You should mitigate that risk, you know, of one of your assets going away or going down by spreading out your investments among lots of smaller buckets. I think people confuse the situations where what is appropriate and when what makes sense.

[00:02:37] If you run a service business, niching down and serving a few really is a more effective strategy a lot of the times. If you run a product business, you often do wanna diversify and have more subscribers or buyers that purchase your product. Services are historically higher touch and higher value.

[00:03:02] While products are less custom and more mass market. Now this isn't always true, but it is true a lot of the time, and I mean, I haven't even begun to cover the fact that you can niche down and still have a target market of hundreds of thousands of people. Niching is not quite as small as I think sometimes people imagine it to be.

[00:03:35] It is harder to get right, but I think the returns are well worth it. Don't be for everyone. Don't say yes to everyone. Don't chase the vanity metrics just for the sake of those metrics. Numbers matter, don't get me wrong, but use them as part of your tool belt of things that help you evaluate your progress and success.

[00:04:04] Don't be driven by them solely. There is an old post by Seth Godin where he talked about promotion and how there's a lot more promotion now than there used to be, but things don't actually convert – people don't convert more than they used to – and it's because, he said something like, being better is better than promotion and...

[00:04:33] I don't know. That always kind of stuck with me. It's a little bit like, you know, "be so good that they can't ignore you".

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.