Niche Blocked
We’re hosting a free webinar on how to build your personal brand as designeron Thursday, October 13. If you’re interested in learning more about audience driven product development and getting yourself out there, sign up!
This is the seventh article in the series of my 30-day writing challenge.
Niche blocked
verb \ˈnich bläk-ed\
- When the niche you’ve established yourself in prevents you from writing or publishing articles on topics outside of that niche
Example: Johnny got niche blocked. He wanted to share his amazing new morning routine but his blog is about video editing, so he thought it didn’t fit.
For the past three years I’ve been writing about web design and development on Hacking UI. I love those topics, and I’ve been deeply engrossed in them for some time. However, sometimes I want to write about something else.
It’s a problem.
You see, Hacking UI is a publication, it has a focus and a specific purpose. But David Tintner also needs a platform to express his ideas. David Tintner is not a publication. David Tintner is a real person, who has a life, and it doesn’t revolve entirely around design and development.
I like design and development, and I spend a lot of my time working on them. But that alone doesn’t define me. I also like to travel, and I enjoy music. I have opinions, and I have an amazing girlfriend. I read a lot, I learned a new language (no I don’t mean C#), and I’m into side projects.
What about all of that? Where can I share the lessons I learn or discuss the topics I’m passionate about that fall outside of my established niche?
We ran into this issue early on with Hacking UI, and made the decision to just say fuck it. We will write and share the stuff we’re passionate about anyway. However, we know that some of our audience is only interested in design and development, and doesn’t give a shit about what we have to say outside of that.
To be completely honest — we don’t care. We want to write about the things we’re interested in and the lessons that we’ve learned. Sagi wrote a post more than a year ago about trying to be a good husband and father. It has absolutely nothing to do with design, but it has everything to do with our lives and who we are as people. If our audience doesn’t care about that, then they don’t have to read it.
Guys like Mike Monteiro, a designer who shares his political opinions and is taking a stand against guns, and Tobias van Schneider, another design thought leader who also has written about panic attacks and public speaking, figured this out a long time ago.
The Side Project Accelerator brought this again to the forefront for us. Sagi and I created the program because we became obsessed with scaling our side project, and pursuing creative and financial freedom, and we wanted to help others do the same. So we started writing about it and sharing links to things we enjoyed in our newsletter.
We got some pushback from this and we saw a few unsubscribes from people who said they weren’t interested in hearing about anything other than design and development from us. But for the most part, our audience has stayed strong.
This all ties back into audience driven product development. If you want to build an audience of people that really, truly care about you, then you can’t let yourself get niche blocked. You have to let that audience in on who you really are and share the things that you really care about. That means you’ll lose some people along the way. Not everyone is meant to be part of your audience, and you have to be OK with that.
Hacking UI is not a gigantic publication with hundreds of writers. It’s just me and Sagi, and we’re taking you on this journey with us. If the journey is not for you, then you can hop off at any point, but for those that hang on, we promise to make it one hell of a ride.
We’re hosting a free webinar on how to build your personal brand as designeron Thursday, October 13. If you’re interested in learning more about audience driven product development and getting yourself out there, sign up!
This is the seventh article in the series of my 30-day writing challenge. Seven straight articles man, that’s hard work. Throw me a bone and hit that big fat ❤ to keep me going.
