The Strength in Skill Stacking
Once we understand the winner takes all effect of the internet, along with its new found focus on specialisation over generalisation, the challenge is figuring out which specialisation you'll have the best chance of winning at. This seems daunting at first, but in reality, the answer is often right under your nose, you're just so close to it that you don't realise what it is.
Specialisation is increasingly more viable
With the internets broad access, you can find audiences that are looking for a product that fits a very specific need, this need may only be applicable for 0.00001% of the population, but with the internet, if you fulfil that need, it means you can still build a viable project.
In this model, we unpack the idea of how to identify and build your own specialisation, by creating your own unique product thats distinct, yet highly competitive. We achieve this by stacking your strengths on top of each other to create a skill stack.
The power of Skill Stacking
To paraphrase the renown philosopher Liam Neeson, every individual has a very particular set of skills, skills that have been acquired over a very long career.
You may have a particular set of skills, and for each individual skill, you may sit in the top 10% of the people who have this specific skill. This would mean you're extremely unlikely to take all in each generalised topic, but if you were to layer, or stack these skills on top of each other to create a single product, the odds of someone else having the same set of skills is extremely small - putting you in a likely position to win, and take all. This is known as Skill Stacking, or Talent Stacking, a concept that has been popularised by Scott Adams.
How to identify and build your own skill stack
The more skills you stack, or the better you are for a set of skills, the more unique and distinct your product will be as a result of your skill stack.
When you map out your skills, it’s best to break this into interest and skills, both hard technical and soft people skills. For interests, look at your behaviours (growing history and regular viewing habits) to find what you naturally gravitate toward. For skills, think of what someone would say you’re a natural at, whats something that compared to a random person on the street you’d be reasonably good at, both technical and soft.
As an example, you may be in the top 10% for:
Interest in WWE Wrestling
Interest in gaming
Interest in your favourite sports team
Interest in a wide range of music
Hard skills in gaming, maybe for specific games
Soft skills in humour
Hard skills in fashion design and textiles
Hard skills in videography and film making
For this list of skills, each of which puts you in the top 10% of the general population, so if you were to take the following skill stack of 2,3,5,6 and 8, you could create videos of you playing games using your local team against other players online. This would place you in the top 0.001% of potential people that could also combine these specific skills together to create the same product.
Interest in WWE Wrestling
Interest in gaming
Interest in your favourite sports team
Interest in a wide range of music
Hard skills in gaming, maybe for specific games
Soft skills in humour
Hard skills in fashion design and textiles
Hard skills in videography and film making
If there is then an audience that connects with these stacked skills, you're extremely likely to have a viable project, that you'll enjoy and have a decent chance of winning at.
Key takeouts for skill stacking:
Look inward and find your strengths: Skill stacking is the idea of finding your list of strengths, think about the things people often consider you a natural at, and then stacking them on top of each other to make a product that is distinctly unique, highly tailored to you and has an incredibly small chance of encountering competition.
You don't have to be the absolute best at one thing: No longer do you need to be in the top 0.001% of one generic skill, because of the massively fractured amount of needs that exist, if you're in the top 10% of the general population for five skillsets or interests in a topic, it puts you in the same 0.001%, albeit for a smaller market.
A small audience size is not a negative: A small audience does not mean there is less opportunity, the maturity of the internet means thats we now have more depth than ever to monetise audiences.