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Comment by bobz | Hacker News Reader

Soon after that I sent Andres the link, and we started throwing around ideas for startup companies. In the spring of 2006 I got a phone call from Andres. He was having trouble finding a low temperature capacitor for his experiment and suggested that we build a database of electronic parts and make it easily searchable on the web.

I love seeing successful YC startups that are outside of the fairly insular "startups serving startups and other stuff startup people are interested in" space.

There's so many verticals out there that have passionate users that are being under-served by today's technology. It might be less sexy from a TechCrunch perspective, but I have the sense that's where a good amount of the lucrative business opportunities are going to be for this next era.

We don't need "a better Twitter", "the next Google", or to be "as big as Facebook". But we do need to bring the power of these products to more and more people and markets.

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The problem is finding them - that is the opportunities to serve relatively niche markets. Unless you are talking to and involved in such an ecosystem you will have no idea it exists or how to appropriately address the niche market's burning problems.

But I agree - from my experience these are absolutely the best avenue for a return on investment. On the flip side, 9 times out of 10, you won't need any outside investment to get the product off the ground, all you have to do is post on a few specific forums and you will have a business overnight.

Agreed, the question is how to find such niches. Though often it's deep, expert knowledge that provides insight, I highly value the idea of the "beginner's mind". An fresh perspective on a new field (or re-obtaining freshness on a familiar one) seems to often suggest new opportunities.

From a lifestyle perspective, having a wide range of interests and making friends in different fields might help...

Lately, the internet has been calling that 'selling shovels' in reference to the gold rush days. Arguably, the guys selling tools to the miners were much better off than the miners themselves. Levi Strauss did pretty good business selling blue jeans.

How did his competitors do?

Not well - selling satin ball gowns to miners, even in San Fransisco, never really got traction.

Why is it?

Is this mostly a social issue , i.e. sexiness of techcrunch like startups ?

Or is it an information problem, i.e. because it's hard for software engineers to come across worthy problems from other domains , that they have the ability to solve ?

Or is is something else ?

A bit of both. When everything hyped around you is the next "social thing" or Google, or Web x.0 app, it can be hard to look beyond that. Now add in that most young developers don't have much exposure to anything beyond pure software, and it leads to 80% chasing the same 5% of application domains.

This is arguably one of the advantages of experience: you're more likely to have been exposed to a wider set of problems, many of which are not being addressed (well) by software.

It's not at all a difficult box to break out of, but the easy part is finding an application domain that you can build stuff for. The harder part -- without having experience in that field -- is figuring out how to reach your prospects. Many of these areas have little to no web presence. It's easy to say "just look at a few forums" but that doesn't help if your customer base isn't online at all.

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