Start looking for "real stuff" you can improve with tech, rather than just software/apps that're hard to defend.
To that end, I often recommend that developers go and find jobs outside of traditional software businesses for a while. If you spend a few years writing code for a publishing house or an oil company you'll see more of the challenges that affect those businesses that you can apply software to. If you spend your entire career working in a software company it's unlikely you'll realise that these problems exist because (generally speaking) software companies have already realised they're a problem and addressed them.
They all have had very different outlooks on the world.
The flooring industry is another place that might be ripe for "disruption", the software often sucks.
Actually anything in the building industry is ripe for disruption. I've worked with architects and every single firm has a different way of handling documents and change order requests.
There's actually a TON of companies that still use paper trails for change order requests. Some use dropbox, some use SFDC (salesforce.com), some use some archaic cloud storage solutions. It's literally all over the map. And every time one of my firms works with a new sub-contractor then they have to try and sync up how they all handle their project documents - its insane.
If someone developed a decent documents management company, based in the cloud, and integrated it with some nice mobile solutions, they would take a HUGE chunk of the market. I mean, think of how many companies are involved designing and building a house.
Not necessarily. Convincing people to fit their workflow into your new software, effectively running their companies around it, is not as easy as it sounds. Coding it is not the hard part.
Truer words have never been said. Selling your vision/workflow/business structure/data presentation is the hard part. Many of the things one may code as a solution will directly and negatively effect the job security of the exact person your are selling to, but that is the challenge. The secondary effect is a chilling of innovation by limiting the automation gains/improvements in some way to limit the impact of value depreciation of current workers.
I ran into a client where they preferred their home-grown Perl script to our million-dollar solution because grep searches faster than we do, even though we have literally a billion more features.
It's not just a challenge with your startup trying to get name recognition. It's a challenge for the major players, too. Inertia is hard to overcome.
Did they need any of those features, or did they need to search?
Yep, they're already on it: https://www.procore.com/
After working on it for past 9 years I can say that the software might looks very simple on the outside, but then you find a lots of proprietary data that are really hard to get (say the information how many man-hours will take laying down the some kind of roof using some type of technology process) and some partnership that will make it quite hard do as an outsider.
I am not saying the disruption is impossible, but it could be very hard and just a better software itself will not help.
Also to say no apps or games will be able to hit it big... Well, just look at Pokémon Go.
The reason it worked is because Pokemon itself is about traveling to different places and finding rare pokemons. That's literally the app - there is 100% congruence.
I think it also helps that Pokemon GO simplified the experience from Ingress which makes it more accessible to a wider variety of people.
Side projects.
Finding a co-founder/business partner with deep experience in the industry. (Worked for me.)
In the dot-com days most programmers thought everything had a computer solution.
With the big jump with people learning to code and being able to build stuff themselves that they started looking and finding opportunities. Back then it was only a few million eyes and few hundred thousand with millions, now a days it's a few hundred million eyes and $100.
It'll only get worse with inflation. You have to compete 1.5x harder than 20 years before to keep up, so really you have to compete 2x harder to be ahead.
Looking for "real stuff" to improve with tech is so 2014, when everyone was pitching the Uber for X or Birchbox for X.
Here's a fun thought experiment: with "real stuff" comes real unit economics, meaning without magical exponential growth of low marginal costs of software to pad $250k comp packs for developers that means software developers and engineers in the middle are going to see their comp package normalize then drop.
I honestly don't think it wise to go into any industry where you lack any kind of domain experience. Turbo Tax is mostly about accounting and tax law, not software development.
I get what you're saying, but while developing software to handle "real stuff" might be more risky and more difficult, it's also going to have some real value.
Also, I don't see how anyone could ever do anything without going into an industry without domain experience. How else will you gain experience?
aka what technological progress has been doing since the very beginning.
From your comment, it seems you'd agree ('incremental improvements').
The app was helpful for Uber, definitely. But moreso, was the change in the way they handled service: ratings, payment, hailing, etc. The app just facilitated those changes.
I think there's a lot of "we need an app" thinking in the industry, but no thought as to what that app will do.
http://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html
We're headed into a deployment age w/r/t the internet, where bigger companies roll out solutions funded internally.