The Anti-niche: Why Being Completely You is Your Best Business Strategy
The world is obsessed with specialization.
As a kid, you were probably asked: What do you want to be when you grow up?
If you had said, “myself” or “me,” you were likely given an odd look, and the person asking would have rephrased the question. Maybe they said something like, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
In other words, you were essentially being informed that simply being you was not a viable option. In adult terms, being you is not a profitable niche, not a profession, and not a path to survival — so you were told.
Fast forward to adulthood. You’re at a party or a networking event when someone asks you: What do you do?
By now, you understand the code. You know what this question really means.
They aren’t asking about your hobbies or your passions. They aren’t concerned with the dreamy things that make your heart flutter and your spirits soar.
Translation: How do you fund your existence?
Your lifelong training and social conditioning kicks in and you start verbally building a box to fit yourself in. Every bit of corporate speak that exits your mouth is nailing you alive inside your self-made creativity coffin.
SaaS — BOOM — Scalable — BOOM — B2B — BOOM — Ecosystem — BOOM — to track KPIs — BOOM!
People politely nod at the jargon you’ve strung together, but truthfully, even you lost interest in what you were saying as you transformed into LinkedIn incarnate. Meanwhile, from inside your box, you can hear the murmurs of your fellow attendees and networkers. Business talk and buzzwords blend together.
Thought leadership…synergy…deep dive…value proposition…let’s table this discussion for later…
There isn’t enough air in room to support this collective conversation. Let alone enough oxygen in that box. So how can you bust out or keep yourself from ending up in this corporate escape room scenario in the first place?
Find a way to make the thing you do, a combination of things you actually want to be talking about, thinking about, and doing every day.
This is where the anti-niche comes into play.
What is the Anti-niche?
The concept of anti-niche challenges the prevailing notion that success requires individuals or businesses to find and cater to a specific, well-defined niche. In many industries, there is a common belief that specialization, carving out a unique space, or targeting a specific audience is crucial. However, the anti-niche approach embraces a broader, more diversified range of interests, skills, or market offerings.
Characteristics of the Anti-Niche:
Diversification: Instead of focusing on a single area, individuals or businesses explore multiple interests or market areas, providing a wide range of products or services.
Generalism: This approach opposes specialization. Generalists possess broad skills or knowledge and can adapt to various tasks or industries.
Flexibility: The anti-niche approach values adaptability and the ability to pivot across different areas or disciplines.
Innovation: By not confining oneself to a specific niche, there is more room for creative thinking and innovative problem-solving that draws from diverse areas.
Resilience: Diversification leads to greater resilience, as relying solely on a single niche can be risky if market demands or trends shift.
Context and Application of the Anti-niche:
In Careers: Professionals might choose not to specialize in one area but instead develop various skills across different disciplines. They might work on various projects or in multiple industries throughout their career.
In Business: A company might offer a broad range of products or services rather than focusing on a narrow market segment. This could appeal to a wider audience and provide multiple revenue streams.
In Content Creation: Instead of creating content for a narrowly defined audience or topic, a content creator might cover a wide array of subjects or vary their content style.
The Advantages of the Anti-niche Approach
The anti-niche approach gives you numerous advantages including:
Adaptability: Adaptability is crucial in a constantly changing job market and world. Individuals with diverse skills and interests can easily transition between roles, industries, or projects. This adaptability becomes a significant asset, especially during economic or technological change.
Creative Problem-Solving: Exposure to various disciplines and perspectives allows anti-niche individuals to approach problems from unique angles. Drawing upon a broad knowledge base, they can find innovative solutions that may elude those with a narrower focus.
Continuous Learning: The anti-niche approach fosters a mindset of lifelong learning. These individuals constantly explore new areas, acquire new skills, and maintain intellectual curiosity. This brings personal fulfillment and keeps their skills and knowledge relevant.
Resilience: By not relying on a single niche or industry, individuals become more resilient to market changes. If demand for a particular skill decreases or an industry faces challenges, they can shift their focus to other areas where they have expertise, ensuring continued relevance and income.
Networking Opportunities: Engaging with multiple fields naturally expands one's network. An anti-niche individual can forge connections across various sectors, leading to diverse opportunities, collaborations, and insights.
Personal Branding: In a competitive market, standing out is essential. An individual known for a unique combination of skills and interests can develop a distinctive personal brand. This can particularly appeal to clients or employers seeking multi-talented, versatile team members.
Satisfaction and Engagement: Exploring various fields can deeply satisfy intellectually curious individuals. It allows them to pursue their interests, stay engaged, and avoid burnout from focusing too narrowly on a single area.
Cross-Pollination of Ideas: Exposure to diverse fields often leads to the cross-pollination of ideas, where concepts from one area can inform and innovate in another. This can result in breakthroughs that may not occur within the confines of strict specialization.
Customized Career Paths: The anti-niche approach empowers individuals to tailor their career paths to their unique interests and skills rather than conforming to predefined roles. This can lead to more fulfilling and personalized career trajectories.
Market Differentiation: In entrepreneurial ventures or freelance markets, offering a wide range of services or a unique blend of expertise can differentiate an individual from competitors. This can be appealing to clients seeking comprehensive solutions or a fresh approach.
To Niche or Anti-niche?
A niche or the anti-niche approach is more than a business or content strategy. Your choice to niche down or not is a life-altering decision.
You will fit into the confines of your niche — or you will expand and evolve into the shapeless form of the anti-niche. The anti-niche is still a niche, but the niche is you. A one-of-a-kind blue ocean opportunity.
Here’s what my personal experience embracing an anti-niche approach has been like. Hopefully, you can find something helpful to extract from my journey and apply it to your own.
Since I was sixteen, I knew I wanted to be a writer. However, I was painfully aware that I was a terrible one. Because of that, I decided to compensate for my lack of talent by being obsessed with improving as a storyteller.
The issue with not being good at something is that nobody will want to pay you to do it. While I wanted to be a full-time writer, I knew my skills were not where they needed to be to pay the bills.
I practiced my writing during my classes in college and the secrecy of my dorm. But I still had no idea or vision for making writing an income. Besides that, the types of writing I enjoy the most — fantasy and poetry — are some of the absolute most difficult to make a living at.
So, I wrote several fantasy books that all ended up in the circular file, unseen and unknown to the rest of the world. My love for writing and storytelling grew, but even as I thought it would be amazing to turn my passion into a career, I did not expect it to happen.
My initial foray into the anti-niche approach stemmed from a lack of confidence in my ability to succeed in a particular niche.
As I wrote and continued to trash my fantasy, poetry, and other fiction, I had another idea. I wanted to create a swipe-based app to help college students find study buddies. The issue with this idea was that I didn’t know how to code and had no money. But it ignited my passion for entrepreneurship and brand-building. Around the time I graduated, I launched StudyHubb and secured over 10,000 users on a zero-dollar marketing budget. My first app glitched, crashed, and eventually failed, yet the experience introduced me to new ideas and ways of thinking.
Right after college, I moved to Venice Beach in Los Angeles, California, with my best friend. I joined him in working for Ziprecruiter as a link builder (an SEO specialist focusing on outreach to secure backlinks) in the heart of “Silicon Beach.” With a thriving tech startup scene, basketball courts, a sandy beach, dive bars that Jim Morrison frequented, and an environment that encourages the live-and-let-live attitude, it was the perfect place for a wannabe writer / aspiring tech entrepreneur / SEO specialist / fill-in-the-blank. I got my first professional writing job as an advertising copywriter at Golden Hippo Media a few months later. Meanwhile, at Ziprecruiter, I switched from the SEO team to working part-time writing blogs and job descriptions. At night, I kept working on fantasy novels in my apartment or penning poetry in Hinano’s, a smoky dive bar a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean.
Because this isn’t meant to be a biography or a full-blown life story, but rather, a real-world illustration of the anti-niche approach and what it can result in, we’ll skip ahead.
I created a utility app My Typewriter (a virtual typewriter), that successfully generates passive income, began picking up freelance copywriting, blogging, and SEO content writing work, and continued to blend my interests in writing, entrepreneurship, business, and lifelong learning. I completed my first autofiction novel “Falling Up in The City of Angels” in 2019. Then I co-authored “Spellbound Under The Spanish Moss,” the fantasy book I’d always dreamed of writing with my dad about a year later while living overseas in Lebanon.
I skipped over a ton of details in order to make this point: If I had stuck stubbornly to a niche instead of following passion, instincts, and curiosity, I would have been waiting in the suburbs for my life to unfold.
The anti-niche journey allows you to venture off with a compass, heading with a heart full of hope in the general direction of your desired destination. You can take detours. You can experiment with new ideas because your identity isn’t rooted in a singular aspect of a thing you do.
You can fail forward and keep going. If the dragon chases you off the first time, you can return with a new character build and fight with a bow instead of a sword.
A niche journey, on the other hand, may require a map. Your character's build is less adaptable. You are a valiant knight. Noble, but the armor won’t stop the dragon fire—whatever disruption that represents to you (artificial intelligence perhaps?). Many individuals who niched down and specialized are losing their jobs to AI. Even professions and niches people thought were safe are being partly or completely overtaken by AI. Web designers, copywriters, artists, graphic designers, and professionals in both blue-collar and white-collar roles are scrambling to adapt. But again, this is not a new phenomenon. Whether we think back to the Industrial Revolution, the Internet Age, the advent of smartphones and social media, or the incoming age of AI Singularity, disruption is often sudden and devastating.
To be anti-niche; however, is to be a shapeshifter. The hats I’ve worn and the roles I’ve played have given me a niche of one. Each job, interest, and opportunity I said “yes” to has informed each other part of my life.
For example, as an entrepreneur, I have empathy and respect for clients and employers, even if I do not agree with a certain philosophy or approach. I know what it’s like for a company to fail, for ideas to flop, and to feel like you came up short. I actively work to provide value and be a worthwhile investment, largely because of those humbling moments. I also know what it’s like to win and help create winning experiences for the people I work with.
Additionally, the anti-niche approach has allowed me to figure out:
What I’m good at
What I enjoy investing my time in to be better at
What skills I have that are transferable and complementary to one another
Where the overlap is with my interests and how to create more efficient systems from these intersections
What I want to do more of
As an exercise to find your niche of one, try to answer these questions for yourself:
1) What are you good at?
2) What do you enjoy investing your time in to improve?
3) What skills do you possess (or would like to possess) that are transferable and complementary to one another?
4) Where is the overlap between your interests, and how can you create more efficient systems from the intersections of your interests?
5) What do you want to do more of?
If you can answer these questions, you may be ready to embrace the anti-niche approach. Along the way, you will see that how you fail is important. Are you focused on building and creating things that will generate future value, regardless of the immediate outcome? Are you likely to develop skills that align with your passions? Are the lessons you might come away with going to help you grow in the direction you want?
The aim is to carve out an anti-niche, your niche of one, in such a way that it rewards you for thinking more deeply about the things you are already interested in. The anti-niche approach is about building a life that rewards you intrinsically and extrinsically for continuous learning.
Launching Your Anti-niche
Launching an anti-niche involves venturing into a broad and diverse territory, embracing multiplicity over singularity. It's about presenting various offerings or embodying diverse skills and interests into a cohesive and appealing package. Here's an effective approach to launching an anti-niche:
Self-Reflection and Definition
Identify Your Interests and Skills: Make a comprehensive list of your areas of interest, skills, and passions, understanding how they interrelate or stand out on their own.
Define Your Core Values: Identify the central beliefs or principles that guide your interests, creating a cohesive thread throughout your diverse offerings.
Market Research
Understand Your Audience: Research to understand who might be interested in your diverse offerings, looking for patterns or shared values to target your audience effectively.
Analyze Demand: Explore each area of interest to understand market demand and identify opportunities to fill gaps with your unique combination of skills or products.
Brand Development
Create a Unified Brand Identity: Develop a brand that reflects the diversity of your interests while maintaining a consistent look and feel, effectively communicating the unique value of your anti-niche approach.
Craft Your Narrative: Develop a compelling story that ties your diverse interests together, helping your audience understand and appreciate the range and purpose of your offerings.
Strategic Planning
Set Clear Goals: Define measurable goals to guide your activities and measure success with your anti-niche.
Plan Your Offerings: Decide how to package and present your diverse skills or products, considering unique combinations or presenting them separately under the same brand umbrella.
Building a Platform
Choose the Right Channels: Determine the most effective channels to reach your audience, such as a dynamic website, social media presence, or online community forums.
Showcase Your Diversity: Use your chosen platforms to showcase the breadth of your offer, highlighting how each element fits into the larger picture of your brand.
Launch and Promotion
Soft Launch: Consider starting small with a soft launch to gather feedback and adjust before a full-scale launch.
Promotion Strategy: Develop a promotional strategy that emphasizes the unique value and appeal of your anti-niche, utilizing content marketing, social media campaigns, or collaborations with other diverse creators.
Engagement and Growth
Engage Your Audience: Build and nurture a community around your brand, regularly engaging with your audience to foster loyalty and gather valuable feedback.
Iterate and Expand: Utilize feedback and market trends to refine and expand your offerings, remaining flexible and ready to adapt to new opportunities or shifts in demand.
Launching an anti-niche requires clarity, creativity, and commitment. It's about confidently presenting a spectrum of offerings or talents and weaving them into a compelling, coherent brand. With thoughtful planning and execution, an anti-niche approach can attract a dedicated following and carve out a unique space in the market, providing a fulfilling and dynamic path for those who choose to embrace it.
When you launch your anti-niche, you reject the box you have been conditioned to put yourself in. You’re permitting yourself to grow organically—to be fully you. The anti-niche approach is a reflection of the authentic human journey.