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Comment by ronilan | Hacker News Reader

You use “the world is full” twice. First to describe the high supply of software developers looking for projects and second to describe the high demand for said services.

So why hasn’t supply met demand? Why isn’t the market working more efficiently?

There can be various explanations for that, obviously, including the lack of information you hint at (“secret”, “have no idea”), but Occam's Razor would suggest we examine the assumptions first.

I’m not so sure that there is such a strong demand side in this market.

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I think part of the issue is that the software startup playbook is not as generalizable as its advocates suggest it is, and an under-emphasis on domain expertise vs software expertise

For ex, in multi-stakeholder industries like healthcare where the people who pay for a product often have incentives that conflict with the incentives of the user of a product, following the North Star of "making something people want" can lead you astray. So many digital health companies make products no one will pay for, or that end up in a narrow consumer lifestyle niche instead of actually improving healthcare in a meaningful way. A team of engineers / data scientists who "follow the user" isn't enough. It isn't even enough to focus on physicians. You really need to talk to administrators and see how the sausage is made

Not sure why this comment is being downvoted, it's a good point. The GP includes this quote, echoing many other people I've encountered who build software:

> The business and industrial world largely still runs on excel spreadsheets, emails and word docs. Those are all areas ripe for new products and many of the top companies in those niche areas have no idea how to apply technology to solve their problems more efficiently.

Spreadsheets are incredibly useful tools! They're general-purpose, easy to use and powerful. Millions of people use them for programming without even knowing it.

Email is still great for communicating! It's everywhere, it's easy to use and it's totally interoperable. How many startups are building decentralized communication tools right now? Email has been federated for decades.

The notion that use of these tools is an opportunity for some more efficient proprietary solution is a bad assumption. People use them because they're good and they work. The parent is right: there's less demand than you think.

While using those tools isn't a sure sign of an opportunity, I've rarely met someone running their business on spreadsheets that didn't wish they had some extra functionality or ability to scale up larger. Sure, some are plenty happy with Excel and email, but there are just as many that would pay for something better if it existed or if they knew about it.

Lots of things are worth applying some automation to, but not worth enough to pay someone to provide as a service.

There's strong demand at a competitive price point and acceptable license terms.

Even though many software companies and startups are trying to push SaaS software "rental" terms, many of the market participants are looking for a one-time purchase more similar to "ownership"

Well I will doubt the supply side. I think it's a simpler assertion, because I know so few nerds.

I think if you live in silicon valley, you have a distorted view of how many people can build software.

I grew up in the mid-south and know of literally one or two other people that code.

I know live in a major metro area and still only know maybe 3 people that code. It is actually a rare skill.

At the same time, I can't even count how many contractors, real estate agents, sales and marketing, and doctors and lawyers that I know.

everyone from high school is a real estate agent

Global dev population is 20M. If the global workforce is 4B people, that's 5 per thousand. Not much indeed.

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