In this week’s installment of Very Niche!, meet Richard Linklater - the filmmaker of cult-classic Dazed and Confused, who has since stumbled into a niche of longitudinal projects.

That is, films created over decades from start to finish.

You might have seen some of them.

The Before-trilogy of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight followed the same two lovers in films released in 1995, 2004 and 2013. Same cast throughout.

Then came Boyhood, filmed annually for 12 years, finally released in 2014.

This signature style of filmmaking is essentially unheard of in the industry, and it's just become his thing.

And so when you hear that someone’s making a movie adaptation of the musical Merrily We Roll Along, a story famously told reverse-chronologically over 20 years, you’re not surprised to hear that it’s a Linklater project.

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As consultants, that’s ultimately what we’re after when we talk about finding your niche.

At first, niching is a survival tool — follow your unique expertise and interests to a viable corner of the market that you can get to know well, and they can get to know you, much more quickly than if you were trying to serve the whole market.

What comes next are the spoils of specialization: the scalable marketing, the affinity with the market, the highly specific and resonant offer, the deeply impactful delivery, the contagious word-of-mouth.

And over time, you get the singularity.

The Linklater-esque effect that when your narrow domain comes up, people say, “Ah, you’ve gotta talk to…[you]”

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Now, for consultants, we’re not talking necessarily about decades-long commitments here. Three-to-six months is typically enough to gauge whether you’ve found a sustainable well in your chosen niche.

Even still, a new consultant will say, “If it does work, what if I get bored?”

Richard doesn’t see it that way, recently laughing off Terry Gross's ribbing that he's crazy, “Yeah, I’ll be around 80 once we wrap Merrily.”

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But he sums up the passion simply as, “I love living inside a project for a long time. [...] I kind of look forward to the new ideas that emerge in the process.”

Doesn’t sound like boredom to me.

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💡

-Wes