Creator Finances

Niche

The growth in the freelance markets is upending the global workforce order, cementing a permanent shift from employment-based to freelance model — with the greatest intensity seen post-pandemic. A recent Upwork and Freelancers Union study forecasts 90 million freelancers by 2027.

That is the U.S. alone.

The same trend replicates globally.

Owning to this oversized growth, the freelance market is building around smaller niche markets, each representing a sub-market or segment of related talent groups.

These submarkets are important because they set the forces of supply and demand, in effect determining market opportunities for freelancers.

New niches and sub-niches spring up, daily — it feels like — to create better supply/demand alignments.

Just recently, I met a freelancer Chat-GPT prompt writer. As interesting as it was, I didn’t know AI has already crossed this threshold — creating active freelance work.

So, the idea is clear.

Anyone intent on thriving in the freelance model should productize their knowledge around a niche and focus on building competency in it.

Drawing on my personal experience as creator economy researcher and the founder of Vlorish, a budgeting and financial management app for freelancers, I can say that niching down is the most transformative step for a creator to improve his/her market potential.

Why is a Niche Important?

In a 2023 Goldman Sachs report, they estimated content creator market to grow to 200 million creators and $500 billion by 2027.

The study qualifies the size of the market.

Only about 4% of global creators are deemed professionals…..

It’s hard to stand out from 200 million people. My experience interfacing with content creators and freelancers in general bears this fact out.

To me, the creator market is like football — few make it to the NFL, but many play the game.

Steps to Niching Down

• Productize — Creators who treat their creative output as a product that needs market-fit understand the power of playing into a niche market, and are ultimately the ones that realize big financial rewards from their craft.
• Specialize— After limiting the scope of your work to a niche, building depth/specialization in that niche is crucial for building authority in it. Authority in a niche is the difference between charging $5 or $10 for the same product.
• Monetize — High quality content has a tangible value like any other product; it should garner its equivalent value in money from the market. Learning strategies to monetize a product should be of significant value to anyone who doesn’t consider themselves a hobbyist or “passion creator.”

In future follow-up stories, I will share specific examples of how to effectively monetize a product and boost income, with substantially the same resources and time input.

Each niche requires an ecosystem of resources to operate at its best — platforms to create/find work, to grow audience, to streamline taxes and accounting. Our app Vlorish is one of them — we support creators on the last mile — finances and taxes. We built Vlorish to become a finance ecosystem for freelancers to budget, estimate taxes, generate P&L, track debts and investments, and measure their financial wellness.