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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

I really love that the very first piece of advice is, in essence, get really good at something valuable that not many people can do. Yes.

Too many people want to find some kind of hack or shortcut, but having distinctive skills that you put to work in creating a lot of value for your clients is the way.

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Honest question: how do you find this? You can spot some from experience in a field but I've often wondered if there is a more systematic way to identify such niches (so that I can mentally compare them and pick one that I'm attracted to, rather than settle for one that I stumble upon).

By really caring about the subject.

Also do homelabbing :)

I think the question is, how to find "the subject".

I've been asking myself this question too. Like you, I have stumbled across some things that I think are important but many others seem to underestimate the value of, and I like to think I can do them well.

But I'm comparatively young, and at this rate I doubt I'll ever discover more than 4--5 such things in total in my lifetime. It would be interesting to have more options. If you ever figure it out, send me a message!

There is a “hack” that you can use to increase your value - jump into a smaller pond using positioning.

“I’m a great React dev” - great, so are literally tens of thousand of other people.

“I’m a great React dev with focus on front-end GDPR compliance” - suddenly, you’re one of a few dozens and can charge accordingly.

The important thing is to niche down on a business concept, rather than a tech concept. People paying invoices usually don’t care about tech, they care about business outcomes.

Edit: reading the show notes revealed that the episode is basically about what I wrote

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