Boring but important niches that would be a best-practices-consulting gold mine

Question

I am absolutely convinced that you one make a very good living as a consultant that helps customers with deep understanding of and practical knowledge in one of the following topics

• Time zones, daylight saving time and leap days/seconds in software processing any kind of events
• Character encodings

Both are small niches hard to get right if you are lacking knowledge and profound experience but come up in many projects. Hence, there would be customers who want to avoid mistakes, and those who have messed things up and need help urgently.

However, those topics are unsexy and probably full of many details that most would find boring, but I know that there are people out there who thrive on solving hard problems of any kind. So my questions are:

• What are similarly bland but important and highly specific niches in the kind of software you develop?
• Do you know people that actually do consulting on one of these topics?

Edit: I'm talking about a skill level that goes beyond being able to build a decent implementation on your own -- to be able to quickly bring a system towards best practices after other people have really messed it up. The latter is not something you can quickly pick up.

Oh, and btw: I'm not thinking about moving into these areas, and wouldn't do it for a lot of money. That's exactly why I think that this boring kind of stuff could earn somebody a good living.

Answer 1

Gold mine niche? Essentially, pick any product that's aimed at big "enterprisey" customers. The salesperson shows the executives all these pretty graphs they can get out of the system if they buy their software. Then they buy the software and realize there's a ton of customization that has to go on to make it do what they want.

Since the technologies are proprietary you can specialize in knowing the intricacies of the proprietary system. That makes you part of a scarce commodity (everyone claims to know Java, but how many people really know all the crazy/insane details of SAP integration?).

Since the products are very expensive, they're typically sold to companies with a lot of money, and they've already shoveled a big mound of cash into this hole, so you can go in there with your $200/hr consultant rate and look cheap by comparison. They love to throw good money after bad.

Answer 2

Niche gold mines aren't so narrow in knowledge base...

The problem with stuff like character encodings and timezones is that any decent developer can become pretty much a specialist in them in the space of a few weeks of intense fulltime effort (max). If it's that quick to learn, too many developers would jump on it if it seems to be becoming a lucrative niche, and soon the balance will shift to the point where enough developers know it that it's not a niche knowledge area anymore.

Gold mine niches are things like massive and complicated proprietary ERP and database systems. Things that take years of fulltime effort to learn well inside out. The effort to learn it has to be pretty much the focus of one's career, not something that any developer can quickly pick up as a side-skill.

TL;DR version: Gold mine niches are centered around stuff that takes ages to learn. It has to be so big that it's more or less your fulltime career focus in the long term. Narrow and quick-to-learn skills like knowing character encodings well are too easy - the existence of a lucrative niche is self-correcting.

Answer 3

508c compliance for federal government contracts is both boring and required! Any entity that produces electronic documents for the government must ensure they meet the criteria for accessibility. This is so specialized, it is insane. I am currently trying to learn this niche because the company I work for does not want to shell out the bucks for a specialist. It is quickly becoming a more difficult endeavor than anyone had anticipated.

Answer 4

Just try to find those with real business value, and that depends on the business you are trying to offer the service. Try offering such highly technical and abstract consulting to someone that only targets a single culture, they may laugh at you... but I don't really think you can regard encoding and time zones as a gold mine, sorry but that is delusive IMHO.

Answer 5

I think the big problems with your example niches are that people don't realize they have a problem. Once they know they have a problem, and what it is related to, they pretty much know what to do to get it right. Before they know what causes the problem (getting â,¬ when needing €), they don't know they need a character encoding expert. Once they do, they are close to solving it.

What's nice about some of the other examples mentioned (Oracle, SAP, other ERP) is that people look for an expert in the biggest part of their problem. They know they want an SAP consultant before they know what problem they want solved. They just spend a $$$$load of money on SAP, and they still have IT problems. Then surely they need a SAP expert to solve them, right?

Another thing you can try is some standards or legal stuff forced upon companies by the government. The more boring and useless it sounds the better. It's easy to sell (do this or go to jail), and everybody hates it, so there will be less competition.