Season “How to Make 250K Per Year” · Episode 3
Finding Your Niche
What do I actually sell that isn't copied from someone else? · 3 November 2026
In most of the startups I worked in, the talk about the website ended at the same question: "What is our USP?" Investors ask it in every pitch. What still surprises me is how often the answer is simply copied from someone else, which is the opposite of unique.
01
Niche, focus, USP: one thing
Whatever you call it, you are saying the same thing. Niche, focus, USP: each word means you pick something that is totally understandable, and ideally really unique. That is one thing I learned about niches, and I think it holds for startups and for anyone who wants to offer something and do business with it at some point.
The copying is what makes it so hard. A USP lifted from a competitor's website gives you the words of a USP and none of the uniqueness, which is why a real one is hard to find.
02
Looking up at the corporates
Each of us is unique in some way, and that is one of the cool things about becoming a freelancer. With a tiny business, though, it is easy to measure yourself against big corporations: their websites, everything those companies have, all the beautiful things they do, their ads.
What gets lost is that the most unique thing you can sell is probably yourself. Nobody can say exactly why I prefer to work with one person and decide against another who offers a similar service. Maybe I just trust that one more. That is exactly the point.
If you are about to go freelance, look at your plans with that in mind. Are you building a small copy of a big company's website, or are you selling the one thing nobody can copy?
03
I was my own USP
In my very first year as a freelancer I was basically selling myself. I knew a lot about the internet and digital marketing, so I had a technical and a marketing background, and I could combine the two and offer them to businesses that I knew needed exactly that. I also had some experience leading teams, which went into the offer as well. They wanted to work with me.
On Upwork, that mix set me apart. So many tracking and martech problems exist because marketers usually aren't technical enough and technical people don't understand marketing well enough. Three tools that had never been connected, data that wasn't transmitted correctly: that was the kind of problem, and I had to learn it myself first. I could stand on both sides, and if you also carry two backgrounds that rarely meet in one person, look there first.
04
Know who you are before you look for clients
This is where the niche starts, and it matters even more once we get to Upwork later in this season. You need to understand who you are and what you can offer. After that you really focus on that offer, and it is the one thing I want you to take into the Upwork episode.
05
This week
Write your offer in one sentence: what you combine that others in your field don't, and who needs it. Then open the websites of three competitors and check whether your sentence could stand on any of them. If it could, it is copied. Mine, in my first year, was tech plus marketing plus some team leading.
06
The open question
If the most unique thing I can sell is myself, what happens to that USP once the business no longer depends on my time? I don't know yet. Selling more of me is one way to grow, and it is the way I am trying to leave. So whether I stay at 250K or go for more also depends on finding something as hard to copy as I am that doesn't need my hours. You can ask your own sentence from this week the same question.
Next in this season: “Minimalism in Business”. What 1,500 holiday photos that nobody looks at taught me about how big a business needs to be.