Essay · ~5 min read

Skill vs Market Specialization

Jonathan Stark · jonathanstark.com Free Beginner

Stark spends his career arguing that specializing is what lets you raise rates, which is the direct counter to the fear that a narrow niche forces you to stay cheap. This short piece separates niching by skill from niching by market and shows how each one changes your pricing power. Treat it as a starting point: narrowing your focus is a route to premium pricing, not a discount coupon.

  • Specializing moves you from a commodity position (where you compete on price) to an expert position (where you can command a premium).
  • Skill specialization lets you charge more with buyers who already found you; market specialization is what actually attracts those buyers in the first place.
  • A narrow niche is a pricing lever, not a cap, because the fewer people who do exactly what you do, the less your price gets compared to a generalist's.
Open on jonathanstark.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. Should I price higher because I'm serving a narrow niche, or does niching mean I have to stay cheap?

Read with it

  1. This is the clearest full-length argument that price should follow willingness to pay, not your costs or your fear of charging... Goodreads Book · ~256 pages Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price Madhavan Ramanujam and Georg Tacke
  2. This is a concrete, hands-on guide to setting price by the value a buyer gets rather than by your costs, which is exactly the... Paddle Article · ~10 min read What is value-based pricing and how is it applied in SaaS? Paddle
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →