To grow your income, you need to focus on fewer products, not more. How narrowing down to one niche broke through my financial ceiling.
To grow your income, you need to focus on fewer products, not more.
As consumers, we like using products that are genuinely high quality — physical goods or services, it doesn’t matter. And there are 3 things that matter most in any product:
- On time (when it’s pouring rain, you need an umbrella right now, not in a week).
- No defects (the product shouldn’t be worse than what you expected when you bought it).
- Delivered politely (if we’re sold what we need, without being treated rudely, and with our interests respected, we’re satisfied).
Building a genuinely good product is far from easy. It takes time, effort, energy, and attention.
Almost everyone thinks their own products are good, but what actually matters is what customers think of your goods and services — not what you think of them yourself. Customers vote with their money for one product or another, by buying it or ignoring it.
When we immediately try to juggle a large number of different products, we end up with low or average quality across the board, and customers aren’t particularly thrilled.
We can’t do a lot of things really well at the same time. If you think about the best products you personally use — an iPhone, a Lexus, the YouTube app, or some great service — those are all cases where the creators kept refining one existing product, instead of shipping a new half-baked thing onto the market every week.
There was a period when I was running an online store, building a marketing agency, teaching in my own private community, offering brokerage-type services, trying to produce content for social media, and working on a bunch of other things at the same time.
As a result, none of those products ever became genuinely good, and none of them brought me many customers or much revenue.
It was only when, in 2022, I started focusing exclusively on creating and distributing educational content (hopefully useful content) that things started to click.
Now thousands of students from all over the world study at our school. I started working significantly less, and the results got dramatically better. It turned out the whole thing came down to focusing on one direction and building one key competency in myself.
In my case, that one competency became creating educational content, and that one niche was online education.
That’s enough to break through a financial ceiling and get to a new level.
It’s important to understand that I’m writing this for ordinary people like myself. The rules are completely different for the owner of a big retail chain or a large online marketplace — the results of their work stopped being tied to their personal time and attention a long time ago.