Ask HN: What are the least competitive consumer and enterprise markets? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the least competitive consumer and enterprise markets?

212 pointstrevett222 comments

My experiment in working backwards from market to problems to solutions:

1. Start with listing markets that have a low degree of competition, but don't have a mega-monopoly owning them. These will mostly be small markets.

2. Examine the problem space within each and see if new technology (SW / HW) can deliver 10x improvements.

3. Determine whether these markets are a short enough hop away from deeper ones.

It's surprisingly hard to get a "map" of existing markets, but am curious about those the community can readily identify.

View on HN

My experiment that I am thinking of recently is almost the opposite.

1. Start with markets with high competition. E.g. paid alternatives to Google forms.

2. Get a list of 50+ products competing in the space. If < 50 go back to step 1.

3. Google to find what people, who are on the paid tiers of those products, complain about. This is easy as I am now Googling brand names so should get laser targeted results (v.s. googling "problem I had creating a form" -> Stack Overflow user who'll never pay for a form!)

4. Interview them to dig in further. If you can't get any of these people to even spare 5 minutes to talk, then it might be an indicator that you wont get them to buy.

5. Based on this, derive a hypothesis for a MVP that would solve the problem, along with the market it serves and where to find these people.

6. Presell to people in #4. If they say no - dig in further as to why. If they say yes, aim for maybe $1000 monthly revenue presold, then build.

The reason for this approach is it filters for the "are people motivated enough to spend money" which I think is the biggest risk for the ideas I come up with. Since they are (they already use the "competitor" product"), can I carve out a niche where I do something better for a specific group of people? Can I reach them easily without spending crazy money on ads? And am I solving their problem?

Caveat is this is designed as an idea generator for an Indie Hacker style project, not a startup!

This active approach to engaging people nicely compliments advice you hear about on setting up passive channels like landing pages w/ Google Ad Words campaigns.

I can't really imagine ever paying for a product that isn't working in any capacity.

I think 6 only works if you can manually complete the process behind the product to give the buyer the illusion that the product is a real product.

And yet people do (kickstarter, for example, or those books where there is only 1 chapter done, but you pay almost full price anyway and wait for the rest)

I think there's a big difference between the types of things that succeed as a kickstarter and yet another SaaS product in a crowded niche.

Can confirm that I'm much more likely to spend money on someone's interesting creative story than on literally any SaaS

I think the goal is reducing risk to something manageable for a single person without capital. If your customers don't believe in the product then you'll have to be the one who believes in the product and for a single person that is a pretty good signal to look for something more worthwhile.

You should probably add a step:

5.5. Derive a hypothesis for why the 50 other competitors have not already solved this problem or couldn't do so quickly once they discover your solution.

If you don't have a good answer for this, then the odds are one of two things will happen:

1. You will waste a bunch of time only to discover that you were ignorant of some deep constraint of the problem area.

2. Your competition will re-implement your feature and crowd you out.

Sounds good, thanks for adding that.

I think the ideal answer would be "if they tried to solve this problem it would be bad for them. Too distracting, and they'd half ass it because it isn't their focus".

Rather than "oh that little feature is on the backlog".

... or they already have your feature in development and will crush you before you even launch...

I wouldn't worry so much about #2 unless the market is extremely small or you're looking to raise money or your only vision of success is a giant company.

Most markets with existing companies serving them are big enough to support a small indie company. And there are things you can offer as a small company that's difficult for big company's to offer.

That's true, but personally, I would be really hesitant to get into a market with several large dominant players without a significant edge. The reality of business in the US is constant consolidation towards a small number of huge, anti-competitive players. I can't find the source right now, but I've seen statistics that the total number of businesses in the US is much smaller today than it was, say, 50 years ago.

So I think your expectation, assuming you are in the US, is that your business has one of a few trajectories:

* You deliberately aim for a market with many small businesses and forces that go against consolidation. There are fewer of these over time, but anything explicitly local, has few economies of scale, or where consumers specifically target variety is a good place to look. Think restaurants, luthiers, and other "craft" businesses. Then you can have a long moderate term success while staying small. You probably won't get rich but you might like your life.

* You try to grow very rapidly to get to be a big fish before the other big fish eat you. You take a ride on the VC train and if you're lucky escape with your soul intact.

* You aim to get bought. You lose the experience of it being your business but you might get rich in return.

* You get crushed or bought against your will. Short of simply fading away from lack of success, this is probably the most likely outcome.

I like this approach. I want to build an alternative for GoodReads focused on privacy (a là Pinboard). Should I search on Twitter for people complaining about GoodReads, ask them why, and after getting feedback, ask them if they would pay for this service? (Something like $10 yearly, or around that)

Be sure to post here when you go live, I want this! I used Delicious Library to keep track of my books but it seems abandoned. I guess the challenge is to have an extensive catalog/API that makes it easy for users to add books to their library.

I would imagine there is a massive library API available somewhere.

Haven't looked into this for a while, but most projects I saw were using Amazon's API, which I guess has the largest international catalog of books. The typical next result is GoodReads, which would be awkward to lean on for building a competitor.

> Please add something like followshows.com, so I can follow authors or series and see a list of upcoming releases. I wanted to build something like that but realized it would be a PitA to get that data.

Oh, and allow me to filter out reviews with over x emojis and over 0 animated gifs.

I’d say those are my main complaints/missing features for goodreads ;)

Beware: if there are markets that appear uncompetitive, there is a damn good reason for it. And it's never becaues no-one thought to look there. If you do find uncompetitive markets, it'll most likely be because someone has regulatory capture, or there is something preventing new entrants, high barriers to entry, or the cost of user acquisition is simply too high for new entrants.

Those are all good points -- I would also imagine that many of the least competitive markets are simply just niche markets. There could be a potential to easily make a 10x product in many of these markets, but the reward is likely not great enough to make that profitable. Although, some people do okay if they're able to make a one-man-shop out of it.

"Science Fiction" was niche until Star Wars sort of blew the doors off.

Sometimes it is niche until technology catches up with a need.

Sometimes it is niche until an un-suckful product is actually offered.

Sometimes it is niche until a sudden shift in the entire economy or market.

The shift from horseshoe-clad transportation to a new thing was rapid only after about 20 years of "niche" gas-powered automotive vehicles.

Sure, some things are niche until they aren’t... but some things really are niche and will stay that way.

My first thought was, someone who makes a hard-to-find part for a low volume vehicle. Take, for instance, the original Tesla Roadster. It sold about 2500 units. Maybe they have a problem that happens in 10% of units. You have a maximum of 250 customers, assuming none are scrapped and you provide the only potential solution.

These are the sorts of situations in which you’ll find very little competition. For a lot of people with niche interests there’s always “that one dude on the forums” who is the only person with the solution.

The same kind of situations arise often in enterprise too, and it’s the kind of things that internal teams or contractors might one-off. But, if you make an off-the-shelf product for it, you’ll be the only game in town!

I think someone should start a thread asking about all the one-offs people have written and see how much duplication there is.

What a wonderful meme: "regulatory capture". Words have power! I'll definitely use this.

It's a pretty common political/economic term

https://xkcd.com/1053/ sometimes it is nice to bask in the glow of another person's TIL. There is a simple joy to it like the smell of freshly-cut grass.

yes and -- informing someone that the term is more widely used than they might otherwise have known is indeed useful

Yes to your second sentence. I read kube-system's comment in good faith. It was providing community context.

I once got excited about what I thought was a cool idea (I can't remember what it was, but something along the lines of "black swan theory"). I didn't know how established it was, so I started inserting it in talks with the assumption people didn't already know about it. I belabored its definition and dwelled on it, when in fact people in academic communities had already discussed it in depth, and have moved on to other ideas. No one said anything, but no one engaged with me after my talks and I wondered why.

Looking back, I wished someone had nudged me and explained the context of that idea in those communities. I must have come across as a pseudointellectual (in that particular context). Feedback matters and is helpful when given kindly.

(on "regulatory capture" specifically, I admit I had not heard the term until about a year ago when it came up several times on Tyler Cowen's blog and on HN)

It's not common in my native language.

Makes sense, I wasn't calling you out, just trying to be helpful.

It’s an idea that is studied in political economy. If the idea resonates with you there are a lot of discussions around it: https://www.theregreview.org/2016/07/07/lupo-a-resource-list...

I think you should still include the temporal factor here.

Yes there might _have_ been a reason for a the market to be competitive, but something might have changed in the past few years that has removed or minimized that reason.

These are the marketing that are ripe for competition.

Okay, this comment reminds me a bit of the economist joke with the $20 bill[1].

But the essence of the comment is spot on, these apparently barren landscapes of competitors often have a cause, and so just finding such a market is only the start of analyzing WHY it seems to be so noncompetitive.

[1] Two economists are walking down the street and one sees a $20 bill on the ground and picks it up. The other asks, "Why did you pick that up? It's clearly counterfeit, if it were a real $20 bill someone else would have already picked it up."

That's the efficient market hypothesis.

Like I said, an economist joke. :-)

Not only a good joke, but it demonstrates a reality of thought, which I am often guilty of.

Could be nascent markets with a few seed-funded startups trying to serve them. The goal is not to find totally uncompetitive markets but those that are more niche, with a lighter degree of competition, where marketing efforts can be more efficient. The last requirement is that there is an overlap with a larger, adjacent market along a few dimensions.

Or, some businesses are just not worth it.

You can throw as much business intelligence and automation to, let's say, an Ice Cream truck. It will still be an Ice Cream truck. Nobody is becoming a millionaire with it.

Pretty sure there are quite a few millionnaires who own ice cream trucks.

All startups either fail or succeed mostly because of management.

You could have a gamified app which tells kids when the ice cream truck is getting close.

I think this is a good example of how sometimes we sit in the VC space where you go from $0 MRR to THE MOON or it really doesn't mater. There are a lot of avenues to really significant lifestyle businesses outside of 4 Hour Work Week SaaS Solo Ventures, It is important to remember that sometimes taking the risk back a notch, applying all the same principles, leveraging less, and working hard -- maybe even making a tangible product, like food, say -- can be just as rewarding.

What if the end goal for the business owner isn't to be a millionaire? Maybe he's totally cool with just having a couple of ice cream trucks and clearing 150K in income every year?

Would THAT be worth it then? Maybe not to you, but to the guy who came from a third world country and built his company from nothing and now he's living an upper middle class lifestyle? To that guy it's the essence of the American Dream.

Or somebody who's been COVID'd out of corporate life and wants a clean start. Sounds viable to me.

I'm not so sure about your example.

Get a self-driving truck, and add some sort of people-sensing system that allows potential customers to intuitively flag it down. Then add a self-serve ice cream vending machine.

Now you can build a fleet of ice cream trucks that don't need human operators. I think you could make a few millionaires with that.

My point is not that automated ice cream trucks are the future. My point is that "small" improvements amortized across enough units can be significant.

Now, there's probably a pretty hard ceiling to the amount of income one of these trucks can bring in, so investing in business intelligence or a snazzy customer experience probably isn't a good investment. (Which is probably what parent was imagining.)

But don't underestimate the power of shrinking costs. If you sell a billion screws a year, a one-tenth of a cent improvement in unit manufacturing cost is a million dollars a year.

Not with just a single truck, probably, but a fleet of them with prime locations (like outside major tourist attractions on a hot day) and selling a premium offering for $8 per ice cream? You could probably make pretty good money doing that, especially if you have some kind of secret recipe (sprinkle some crack in every pint!).

You can become a millionaire by scaling up almost any business. I doubt you’d become a billionaire but who cares?

I believe some of these very small businesses rely on that the owner (and/or his family) is working below minimum wage; so if this is the case, it cannot scale up.

Take good photos of product, grow IG following, give tips on how to grow your own ice cream truck business, dev and sell course on how to quit the 9/5 and start your own food truck niche

depends on your def of millionaire, but to make 1M you only need to convince 2,000 people that your 500 dollar course will set them free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> Or, some businesses are just not worth it. > You can throw as much business intelligence and automation to, let's say, an Ice Cream truck. It will still be an Ice Cream truck. Nobody is becoming a millionaire with it.

That's probably what people said about coffee and cafes prior to Starbucks.

Starbucks is an essentially American phenomenon. e.g., nobody in Europe ever thought coffee shops needed to become branded chains that set a single product quality expectation, because almost nobody who'd ever visited an Italian/mediterranean-style cafe ever thought they lacked a quality or sociability option to begin with. Sure, some chains exist, but the quality delta between them and the average cafe isn't great enough to scale fast.

Only in a place where coffee is generally awful, and VC money easy, could the concept that became Starbucks ever come into existence.

There's a whole lot factually wrong about your comment (Starbucks started as a single cafe, it wasn't funded by VC, and it started in the 70s/80s when money was far from cheap, and 1/3 of its total outlets are in Asia).

But that's all beside the point. I'm not saying an Italian would be able to replicate Starbucks in Italy. What I'm saying is that there are countless opportunities staring us right in the face, every day, and 99% of people see a cafe and think "it can't scale, it's local demand only, there's no point, why bother", the remaining 1% see Starbucks.

Just to follow up on that: I'm sure we agree that Starbucks metagame is about selling more than just beverages. It's about selling a middle-class aspiration -- using concepts like a "third place", "Italy", etc. This is why Starbucks is a $24b revenue company and Dunkin is a $1.4b revenue company.

Luigi Zingales, an economist at UChicago, once said, "the fact that Starbucks is not Italian is hurtful. The extreme agency problems of Italy make it difficult to scale firms.".

One class of markets that I suspect is a target-rich environment: disability-adaptation tech.

1. There is a decent chance that existing entrants are tied down by a focus on meeting the regulations rather than on delighting users.

2. You might be able to significantly scale-up and thus improve the unit economics.

While the market of people who can pass the means-testing to qualify for whatever government-subsidized benefit exists might be small, the nature of bureaucracy means there is often a MUCH wider pool of people who are "quasi-disabled", either permanently or temporarily.

Note that there are a few disabilities which are so overwhelmingly common that the market is already saturated. The classic example is eyeglasses.

3. The specific disabled population is a ready-made population of early adopters IF you identify that you can keep your focus on delighting users and just use the regulations to remind yourself of risks and edge-cases. (This really will depend quite heavily on the quality of the regulations -- notice the difference between Japanese zoning and SF-bay housing-approvals) Lots of legacy disability tech:

* Has a pretty frustrating maintenance cycle, so you can win on a strong customer service brand IF you can innovate on operations.

* Can be pretty frustrating to use, so you can win big on design.

A focus on delighting users rather than ticking boxes is naturally going to produce a naturally better product. Here is the key tactic though: lean on the early-adopters for high-detail feedback. This problem occupies a much larger proportion of their lives than the average user of a product.

This higher-strength signal of user needs is known as the "Curb Cut Effect". https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/11/15/the-curb-cut-...

This also seems to hint at a good trick to turn any regulatory box-ticking exercise into purpose-driven-design. After all, a focus on privacy-by-design is better than a focus on the letter of GDPR-compliance, right?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hilariously, I used to work for a YC company unwittingly building assistive tech for my particular disability. Their Curb Cut effect was so ridiculously strong, they've occasionally written ad copy with reference to a symptom I've experienced and I'm pretty sure they still don't even realize it. Looking back, I now really wish I had been self-confident enough to explicitly disclose -- especially when their CEO started using a wheelchair.

The problem here is that the real customers are the health insurance companies, Medicare, and the VA. They don't care about being delighted, they want inexpensive and rugged devices.

That's the problem Dean Kamen had with his iBOT wheelchair. They were very cool and their users loved them, but they went for something like $25,000 each and likely needed frequent maintenance.

Yup, if you’ve every watched network TV and seen the “Did you know Medicare will pay for X?” and wondered why, it’s exactly this.

If you want Medicare to pay for a product, you need a positive Coverage Determination. And if you get it, you just opened up a 50M person market (obviously a subset, since not everyone will need it) and all you need is the patient to say to their doctor “I want that” and it’s paid for.

It’s a heavily front loaded business, but if can get reimbursement, it’s basically paid for, you just need customers to ask for it (I’m obviously simplifying, since it varies by product type, but medical equipment is a great example).

Which is why a lot of the real money is in products that have wide appeal for non-disabled users.

This is where most of the bizarre "as seen on TV" products come from: The inventor made a tool for people with disabilities, found that the target market wasn't large enough to sustain a business, and frantically tried to pivot. Pivoting is hard when you already have a large inventory of hard products.

If you can build something that able-bodied people are not only willing to use but willing to pay extra for, then you're good to go.

yep, this is my argument

I'll challenge this.

I've found there are a lot of secondary markets that get overlooked by VC. Typically, these markets have (1) a lower ceiling so they're overlooked by VC's needing an outside return. They can still be massively profitable for a bootstrapped or lean company. (2) Require deep knowledge of two non-overlapping subjects.

Anecdata: I've seen three or four companies that look like this, one attracted VC (after proven traction), one was rejected cause (external risk) and the others are a nice tidy business for the founders and a few employees.

Sometimes I hear, pejoratively, a "lifestyle" business.

To give an example: I once considered entering the market of doctor appointment software. The existing players in my country all have bad UX, and it seemed relatively easy to build a superior product.

But then on researching it deeper I discovered the basic problem with the market is that doctors won’t pay enough on a monthly basis for a high-touch sales process and they still mostly insist on one or more personal visits before buying the product. So, you basically lose money on every customer for the first year or two, meaning it is really hard to build a sustainable business. I got access to the financials of two of the existing players, and they were not good. They did the minimum investment into the product they could get away with because the market wouldn’t allow for more than that.

In the words[1] of @spakhm appointment software for doctors is not a showstopper and definitely not a gamechanger.

I've been researching medical market a lot. There are many reasons why appointment and practice management software isn't a great business. But the number one reason is that it doesn't create a great value for doctors. Patients will still come and use the same doctor, insurance companies will still pay them the same, it won't bring new patients, it will not make it easier for doctor to manage his practice since he still has to have a nurse which does this.

On another hand, it makes it easy for their patients to go somewhere else since EHR need to be completely available to patient. This is an unnecessary risk.

[1] https://www.defmacro.org/2013/09/26/products.html

This can be nicely compared with booking.com, where hotels get great benefits from the platform. Because market for hotels is so much different. You are not going to look for a doctor on the other side of country.

So if one wants to make an appointment/booking software, would have to look for things that would bring new customers. Helping with discovering places.

In the doctor + booking.com, I’m a digital nomad and absolutely would look up a doctor in NotMyHomeTown. The mild annoyance for me is that doctors usually have an on boarding process that talk on additional time and money to any visit. It’d be wonderful, but quite possibly not practical, to have a medical history that a doctor could access instantly so I don’t have to fill out a bunch of stuff & pay extra. Same for dentists.

I think this should be upvoted more.

People bash bad UX and buggy software all the time, like "those developers are sooo bad".

What they mostly don't realize that software is only as good as much someone is willing to pay for.

It's surprisingly hard to get a "map" of existing markets

No, it's not. It might take more than a Google search.

You can extract what you want from US business census data. See "data.census.gov". Look for NAICS codes with a small number, but greater than 3, companies, and high dollar amounts for the category.

It seems there are 19 codes: https://www.naics.com/search-naics-codes-by-industry/. I'm interested in more granularity e.g. where "mobile video editing software" appears on the map, show me the market size, top companies, estimated sales, etc.

That's just the top level of NAICS codes. For example, 441320 is tire dealers. 512191 is "Teleproduction and Other Postproduction Services"[1]

"Mobile video editing software" is a product type, not a business type. If you want product categories, you need a different data source. Such as Amazon's, or Google's or Alibaba's product tree. Here's Google's product hierarchy.[2] Google category 4953 is "Software > Computer Software > Multimedia & Design Software > Video Editing Software".

If you want such results handed to you without much work on your part, you may have to pay a company which collects such data. NAICS or D&B or some of the mailing list companies could make you a list.

[1] https://www.naics.com/code-search/?naicstrms=video

[2] https://www.google.com/basepages/producttype/taxonomy-with-i...

Thanks for that. I think the NAICS codes could be fleshed out a little to be more relevant and useful.

Not to beat this example to death, but there is a market for mobile video editing applications and I have no idea of its size. Wikipedia only lists one iOS product. I feel there would be a lot of value in providing this kind of information easily to people. I personally don't want to engage with a market research firm during the exploratory phase.

So you're saying it's an area... without a lot of competition...

I've been doing research on this exact category myself (after having previously had some modest success on the image editing side.) You're severely underestimating the number of competitors. Try searching the relevant app stores instead of Wikipedia (why would you ever even check here?).

Right, I was making the point that there should be more info online about the entire mobile video editing app market (one example). I know there are many such apps in the stores.

I think parent was complaining that there's very little public information (particularly hard numbers) about the incumbents. GP was cruising Wikipedia for information about the apps' parent companies rather than just trying to identify the apps.

It's easy to see how many apps are in the store. It's a lot harder to know how much money they are grossing.

Do you realize that you just posted an idea for a niche business?

I agree, it's not that hard to map out markets. I have relied on third party business intelligence softwares like Tracxn to get good overview of markets.

Could be labor organizing. I've had a job for years and never even been solicited about it.

The incumbent players are ignoring massive swaths of the addressable market at a time when, judging by my social media feed, there is renewed interest in labor issues.

A big reason for this is their reliance on a high-touch, manual onboarding process and slow, high overhead contract negotiation techniques. Prime for marketing automation, SaaS tools, chatbots, etc.

Additionally, for purely historical reasons, they have segmented the market by trade. There's no particular reason for you to follow this path, may as well help everyone get a better deal from their employer (and a cut for yourself!).

That's interesting. I never would have thought about this area. If you can shoot me an email (in my profile) I would love to ask a few more questions about this, if you have the time.

this is tangential to the problem https://www.ganaz.com/ is solving I believe. Labor for industries like cruise ships (~400k), cargo ships (1.1M), dairy etc is still organized and managed very manually. You could foresee an opportunity to build a Gusto or Salesforce for these industries with a decent TAM.

I don't know much about contract negotiation, but for organizing "high touch" doesn't begin to describe it! The labor organizer's job is to convince the worker, who likely and often rightly fears for her job if she actively and publicly supports the union, that it's still the right thing to do. Not only convince intellectually, but psychologically prepare the worker to stick with the union effort in the face of a concerted effort from the employer to defeat it. To do that the organizer needs to ask the right questions, listen carefully, build trust, and finally push, and potentially do this repeatedly with the same person. It is psychologically demanding and not everyone can do it; I tried and I couldn't. A chatbot cannot convince a factory worker with kids to feed that he needs to stick up for his coworkers who in turn will stick up for him. All that said I think there is room in the process for profitable automation, but it's auxiliary to the main work.

If you're interested Jane McAlevey's book Raising Expectations and Raising Hell is a good introduction to union organizing.

Check out the translation industry. It's a fairly niche market, with its own quirks. There is a good book that gives an overview of how the industry works, but I can't remember the title atm. It has a yellow cover and some cartoon drawings inside... :) If you're interested I can dig a bit more and find it.

There is software for translation management, which is essentially project management, but because of the intricacies of the business there is specialized software for it. There are maybe 2 or 3 main competitors, all of which do the job but are fairly awful to use. Then there are a handful of products which come from computer-assisted translation (CAT, which is different from machine translation), and try to capture the project management part as well. Because their focus is on CAT, they're also not excellent in the management aspect.

If you want to capture the whole spectrum with all the edge cases, it's going to be a very complex product which will require a lot of user research and take a fairly long time to build. But there might be an opportunity to go to market earlier, with a subset of the functionality, and build from there.

At a previous job I built an internal translation system forked from pootle because the commercial options were so bad (mostly wrt UX). This was 8 years ago, so I would have to do a survey to learn what the state of things is today. It's possible the existing solutions are "good enough" and the switching / retraining costs aren't worth it for most organizations. Not to be too Thiely, but I wonder what a 10x improvement looks like in this space as well.

Switching costs is a fair point. I think the biggest improvements can be made in UX and in having great APIs which enable integration and automation.

If you can remember the title of the book I’d love to read it.

It’s called ‘The General Theory of the Translation Company’ by R. Beninatto and T. Johnson.

Thanks!

Thanks a lot for diggin' it out! Looks really interesting, yay!

I think they’re talking about the „for Dummies“ books

I’m working at Lilt (lilt.com) right now, and this is exactly why I’m excited about the company ;)

When it comes to market selection, I often think back to how Ryan Petersen came up with the idea of Flexport. He put up landing pages and some ads, and only when he saw interest from the biggest players did he go all in. It's a pretty darn good way to find out, even if it sounds too simple, or cheap, but if you listen to the rest of the interview, Ryan had semi-failed enough times beforehand to realize that simplicity was key. Maybe throw a bunch of landing pages up and see what works?

(original audio segment: https://smashnotes.com/p/y-combinator/e/92-ryan-petersen/s/h...)

That's pretty cool! Didn't know that Flexport started out like this.

Here's another example of using a landing page to validate demand, and one where the product ended up being a very successful company: https://sumo.com/stories/80-20-business-idea-validation

I recently played around with the landing page method for an idea I had and ended up not getting much traction. That negative feedback was really useful in helping me decide whether to actually code up the app. Wrote about here, if anyone's interested: https://abiraja.com/the-landing-page-method/

Good read. I think for anyone creating so many ideas and want to test, it is safer to try landing page method. 100 ideas, 3 really gets traffic, then those 3 really work.

Yeah, I think the key point is that the landing page method is great for identifying smashing successes (high true positive rate, low false positive rate). But ideas that fail the landing page method might still be good, just need more investigation (high false negative rate).

I know a niche in hardware, encountered while doing R&D for an F500.

High sample rate (20 Hz min.) sensor telemetry (9 DOF IMU + GPS) over cellular network, as a single encapsulated unit with built in antenna and a battery to handle power interruptions.

Data needs to go a remote server and devices should be remotely manageable if deployed as a fleet.

I searched quite a bit and eventually ended up using a bunch of Samsung Galaxy phones in a hard case, with a datalogging app and an automation that syncs log files to Dropbox. Devices were managed over TeamViewer.

There are some small players in this field each satisfying 70% of these requirements and they're printing money.

All the pieces are out there. Just need someone to make a product so enterprises can throw money at them.

I like your minimalist solution. Fleet tracking / management seems like a commodity business with a lot of players in it. How do you differentiate and win here?

Fleet management solutions are built for EDL requirements. They have event based logging and won't log data at high sample rates and don't send it to a server of your choice because they want you to use their subscription based dashboard.

Curious which applications require logging at high sample rates vs. doing event-based?

From my narrow experience as an R&D engineer in the auto sector:

You need to understand the duty cycle of the platform you're developing for (ex. Tires for a vehicle). A garbage truck is going to have a different loading cycle from an EV or a CAT morning truck. If you know the right conditions your product will fail on durability.

Fleets are ok with collecting this data for R&D as long as you don't bother them with extra work and give them useful analytics. Data collection devices need to be easy to install, collect for a few weeks and remove.

You can also use this as an R&D platform to develop IoT data-enabled products like predictive maintenance, route analytics, insurance and warranty claims etc. ML has a lot of potential here but you need to collect data.

Eventually when you have an IoT product you can get a vendor to make an optimized ASIC to collect and process exactly what signals you want.

There are many more applications in the auto industry for these kind of niche products.

Vehicle crash analysis for one.

There's an existing product called the SlamStick that's used to record high-shock/high-vibration environments. They released a paper on using one to find the source of a troubling vibration in a Navy helicopter. I came across them when doing research for a customer in the Vehicle Dynamics space.

It's one of those little niches that no one knows about and seems to support quite a few small companies.

Could you elaborate? What are these used for?

R&D work mainly.

To understand the duty cycle of your products (let's say a tire) in the field.

To collect data to train ML models or to develop algorithms.

Use as a prototyping platform for IoT products.

i'm in automotive, and we've looked into this a few times for commercial fleet telemetry. It's just impossible to beat the pricing of cheap mobile phones when they have the volumes.

Yeah pricing really isn't the issue here. We're talking enterprise. The market rate for a data logging device that does something close to this Galaxy mobile is $750-$1000.

Do you have more information about the industry that would use this?

Automotive. See my other responses in this thread.

Language and culture is usually a barrier. For example, one of my apps really blew up because we targeted Malaysian low carb dieters. Western low carb diets are well done and cover all kinds of things like steak and pizza alternatives. We covered local dishes like laksa (spicy noodle soup) and rendang (a kind of meat dish). We got 3,000 monthly active users with very little paid marketing and 3% of them were paying customers.

This fit in with your other requirements - it would be easy to hop from low carb recipes to say, Indian vegetarian recipes.

The 10x trick is done by looking for crappy apps with a substantial user base. In our case, we were competing with a FB group with 200 thousand users and a constant stream of posts that made it difficult for people to look for recipes. Our app competitor was a HTML5 app which someone did as a technical demo, with 50 thousand users.

90 paying users is cool but I wouldn’t say it “really blew up”

It was a health food grocery app, so basket size per user was high. It was RM32-RM128, which by purchasing power translates to roughly $40-$168 per paying user per month. This is also averaging it - as a diet app, we peaked around Dec-March.

And it was more on the flow. We got 1200 users in the first 24 hours, after a two week hack. There was definitely a market there. The goods were overpriced because we didn't have economy of scale, but if we did get the prices down as intended, we'd have far more regular customers.

How did you perform market research for a country like Malaysia. Was your idea based on some personal observations?

Pivoting. It was originally a grocery price comparison app. That was illegal (long story). So we pivoted to a recipe app and try to sell ingredients. We looked at other recipe apps like Cookpad and felt that what they were missing was quality control.

We wanted a quick and dirty prototype that was a subset of the grocery market, so that if it didn't go well, it would just be controlled damage.

I was following a low carb diet so I did a low carb diet app, solving my own problem. There were some blogs and a crappy app that did this. The Facebook group had too much traffic to keep track of recipes and no quality control, so half the recipes were terrible. We released the app, expecting about 30 downloads but it was 1200 and crashed the server temporarily. We also got some feedback that calorie count wasn't helpful, so we switched to carb count, and were the only ones on the market to compile all the local recipes and have carb count for them.

The business model canvas helped a lot in the process. We drafted a business model, then identified the riskiest thing and tackled that. At first it was the business proposition (which went from find food > eat healthy > lose weight). Then it was revenue model (sell directly, instead of ads). Then operations, delivery. The target market was unintended and we could well have missed it, because low carb diets aren't part of the culture.

Damn HN has no notification system!

Interesting story. A Pakistani who is willing to get settled in Malaysia in coming years, I was wondering what kind of things I could make for the local market which made me to ask the question.

Services that sell to HOAs

This is something I've been thinking about since my HOA sent me an email a month ago warning me that the sidewalk outside my property may be damaged and in need of repair because if someone tripped I'd be liable for this. Of course the email had a bunch of red and gold text.

Luckily for me they already had a concrete cutting company come by and survey the area and provide estimates for each plot.

My bill would be about $200 to fix the sidewalk. I looked outside and it was totally level and no edges exposed.

In really small print at the bottom of the email was information telling me it was optional to do, but again I might be liable if anything happens.

Today I saw this person outside doing the concrete repairs. It was a guy with a small trailer and grinding down the sidewalk with an angle grinder and a vacuum to suck up the dust.

This basic concrete cutting job is pulling money in if he can go around and tell all the HOAs about the urgent need to fix sidewalks and HOAs pass that along to all the residents.

How many people paid the $200 "to be on the safe side"?

Now you repeat for all the other services you can think about for home maintenance and repair and contact HOAs with estimates they can pass along.

I would love to get rid of my HOA to be honest. We have a property management company that interfaces with them. I put in a change request back in early June. I am still waiting for approval.

My neighbor mentioned something about bylaws and the requirement for HOAs is only 20 years. That is up in December. However, I have to confirm that.

So, you wouldn't really be liable for this right?

It's not about liability. It's about scaring people into thinking something is broken when it's not. If your sidewalk is in good condition you're not going to see any accidents. Being liable for zero accidents isn't the same as not being liable at all.

>because if someone tripped I'd be liable for this

isn't the sidewalk the city's responsibility? Also, wouldn't your homeowner's insurance cover it?

>In really small print at the bottom of the email was information telling me it was optional to do, but again I might be liable if anything happens.

Honestly the arrangement seems rent-seeking(ish) to me. At the very least it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They're not providing any real value, just scaring people into paying with an (arguably) misleading letter.

If you’re aware of a potentially dangerous problem, ignore it, and somebody gets hurt because of it, your homeowner’s insurance isn’t going to rush to cut a check.

But is that the case here? OP said it was looked flat.

Sure. But then there was a letter from what in this case can be seen as an expert warning of potential danger. If that was intentionally ignored, would it be impossible to claim some level of negligence?

Shady.

Insurance companies (in the US at least) will easily drop you over something like this, even if they do pay out first.

> isn't the sidewalk the city's responsibility?

There are plenty of cities where the homeowner is responsible for maintenance of the sidewalk and street trees. My city will cover 50% for city trees replacements and root damage to sidewalks. I last year replaced two old trees and it cost me just under $1k after splitting with the city. To make it worse, the contractors raised the prices when the city started offering the 50% cost sharing.

> They're not providing any real value, just scaring people into paying

Unfortunately there are plenty of business built exactly like that.

One anecdote: there was a group of lawyers that would hire people in wheelchairs to go into stores (e.g. local Verizon dealer) and ask to use the restroom, then once inside the restroom measure everything and take notes. Apparently businesses are not required to make their restrooms available to the public, but if they do, they need to be up to code. So these guys would target chains of businesses that normally didn't allow public into their restrooms, hence the restrooms were usually not up to code. After gathering enough data they would then sue the companies and offer to settle for an amount very close to what it would cost the company to deal with the case in court.

There are plenty of cases regarding ada abuses in california.

Or you could see it as them using the Ada for it's exact intended purpose, to force businesses not to exclude disabled customers by imposing an actual cost on them that is potentially greater than the cost of complying with the act. Sounds good to me!

I don't see how this is good. Some businesses allow their customers to use their private bathroom on a case by case basis. Now they will just stop doing that so everyone suffers equally.

Their bathrooms should be accessible for their employees as well, even if they're not usable by customers, because disabled people should be able to work to.

In many parts of the US the city bills the homeowners for sidewalk repairs or replacement even if they do the work.

In areas with an HOA often the HOA or homeowners are responsible for things the government is in other places, roads, street lights, sidewalks, storm drains.

So basically bilking people with overpriced and unnecessary (not to mention: loud) services by making vague legal threats?

As a society, we should really spend more time and effort doing this.

Three of my friends are doing “HOA” non-tech plays. So there’s totally space.

Here is a company from India https://mygate.com/. They recently got $56 million in funding.

You realize this is basically a shakedown, likely with either a kickback from the concrete cutter or nepotism? Seems kind of unethical

And you think this is a good idea?

Since I made this comment yesterday I've thought it about it. lot more. I did some more research and discovered there is a franchise!! around sidewalk repairs exploiting ADA requirements from schools, govt buildings, etc type places that have to maintain compliance.

So the comments referring to this being a shake down are pretty much on point. I mean it isn't much of a surprise.

There's real value to what this service offers, people do want to fix mangled sidewalks, but the shakedown side of the business is where the money is at unfortunately (or not depending on your morals).

Also I was off on the costs, in the email it said there were 2 spots affected and the estimate was $280!! It took the guy ~2 days to do the whole neighborhood, each section took maybe 15mins at what looked like a comfortable pace. So the $/hr is very high.

food for thought

The least competitive markets are most likely local small-businesses with regional restrictions. By this I mean places that where you need to physically go (e.g. dry cleaner) or where someone needs to physically come to you (e.g. electrician). Because you're only competing with people in a specific region, these are going to be much less competitive than industries where you compete with the whole world (e.g. software).

This doesn't necessarily help you come up with new software, but it is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about since I'm also trying to start a business.

I would pay handsomely for a service that would find and dispatch a qualified tradesperson (electrician, residential HVAC, plumbing, &c.) that would show up when promised and get the job done. And would guarantee the work, pull permits, and get me a lien waiver afterwards. I really hate the time it takes to wade through online reviews, play phone tag, and deal with flakes and no-shows when there's something that needs to be done around the house.

My approach to this:

* Go for people that work primarily commercial. You'll pay more, but they tend to be much more professional.

* If you can't get that, start with a small job. Take something that you _know_ you can do and hire it out. See what comes out of it.

Interestingly, this is the problem online reviews were supposed to solve.

Yes, but most of the time companies that run those review sites don't care. To make difference you would have to check people on your own and that does not scale. Doing stuff that does not scale might get you a decent company but you are not going to be unicorn. Unfortunately a lot of people aim to go to the moon instead of having both feet steady on the ground.

For those tradespeople, running a small business can be seriously time consuming. I try to support lone tradies or very small business people, but it's almost always easier finding slightly larger ones that have enough staff that there is someone handling quotes and delegating tradespeople.

I'd suggest building a backoffice for tradies that automates as much as possible. Payments, chasing payments, reminding them of people waiting for quotes, etc. A CRM app that all their incoming enquiries go directly to, etc. Otherwise they have quote requests coming into their phone messages or emails and getting lost along with everything else. I run a small business and have 200-500+ unread emails at almost any time. If something slips off the first screen of G-Suite, it is much harder to remember it.

ServiceTitan[1] is a big company that does exactly this, but there's probably space for more than one player.

[1] https://www.servicetitan.com/

Something like this has been a business idea I've been sitting on, but it's hard to get started (chicken egg, have to get enough customers AND tradespeople for it to be worth either's time), and could be capital intensive.

I figured it's actually easier to sell this service, at least to start with, to small and medium sized businesses which don't need fulltime staff for some trades oriented work, but have enough of that kind of work for it to be worth setting up a business relationship. But of course the issue with this is it's just a small business idea - you'd need to figure out how to add value to differentiate yourself from the thousands of contractors already doing this if you want to scale beyond the lifestyle level.

If you want quality you usually contact a business that has gained a good reputation, not an individual person. They usually charge more and have a big backlog spanning multiple weeks but the people they send are highly qualified.

That backlog is absolutely necessary for the business to function though. Without the backlog there is idle time and since professionals work for a salary that idle time has to be paid for by passing costs onto customers.

UrbanClap[1] does something similar in India.

[1] https://www.urbancompany.com/

So usually what happens is that an individual is an expert in their under-served area, sees the opportunity, and then puts in the effort to build a business to serve that opportunity. The point being that you won't get people who know of lots of opportunities, but rather many individuals who each know of their own opportunity. And you most likely won't find such domain experts on HN.

It might be worth looking for evidence of attempts at building such businesses, since often such domain expertise doesn't pair with business-building expertise. So if you're trying to build such a map, then maybe look at all the businesses (including all the failed ones) that served each market.

Related: I highly recommend The Blue Ocean Strategy[1]. I suspect what you are looking for is the Blue Ocean market space, not necessarily the "least competitive". As others have pointed out, if a sector lacks multiple entrants, it is almost always with very good reason.

[1] https://learn.blueoceanstrategy.com

You can safely bet than any below the highest tech-level industries (so anything not called Apple, MS, ....) are under-served.

I work in the small-bussines and before in government. have done some stuff for some of the biggest companies in my country (Colombia).

To say ALL of them are like 20-10 years behind is not say enough.

Today, I'm integrating with cobol and other stuff that only have text-based files as interface.

A problem is that not many investment are in this long tail, so when talking about solutions for this market is possible to NOT get excitement for it.

I'm building on the side a relational language that eventually could be an Access+Excel tool, but everyone is interesting in the markets that reach billons :).

I like to look at industries that customers hate. Tech support, cable, wireless, health insurance,etc.

I picked tech recruiting for my most recent startup. :)

We've bootstrapped to over $2M in revenue in 18 months. People seem to like the service much better than traditional recruiting.

(Shameless plug: https://www.facet.net)

That's awesome, congrats. I can't tell what your secret sauce is from your website. I'd love to ask you how you marketed this service if you want to shoot me an email (see profile).

I’m not sure whether the competitiveness of the market is very relevant for your success in finding a profitable innovation. Profitable innovation is hard, in any market.

There may be an expectation that there are higher profit margins in non-competitive markets, so you may have an advantage there that any innovation will allow you to capture more excess profits as it will take longer for those excess products to be eaten by increased competition you triggered.

On the other hand, there’s an expectation that the incumbent(s) in a non-competitive market has a lot of funds at its disposal (due to years of capturing producers excess profits in a non-competitive market) to hamper innovation.

To me, this illustrates that whether the market is competitive or not is not very relevant. The question is whether you are able to outcompete the market by reducing costs and/or improving your offering compared to your market, whether that’s a single monopolist or 1,000 highly competitive companies.

Are you familiar with Porters five forces? and the sixth, which is regulatory environment?

If you're not, it's worth it's weight in gold when evaluating markets and looking at how do build your business model.

A lot of good comments here.

A different way to approach this problem, is to consider culture: 'people like us, are attracted to certain things'.

Those fields are overwhelmed.

So, where are the 'completely unsexy' areas?

1) Human Waste. Port-o-potties are a huge business, and it's a nasty problem, pun intended.

2) Agriculture. Farms are not hip.

3) A lot of goods and services targeting low-income people who are extremely price sensitive and don't care about how cool things look.

4) Anything to do with a business that is mundane: cleaning, forensic accounting, physical security, garbage, etc..

Literally walk down the street and look at what people do, it's funny how you can get an instinct for how very 'specific' YC pattern types are, and how we're a little bit out of touch.

I agree, we may have reached peak level of Seth Godin-approved consumer startups.

Re: 1, it does bother me producing all that plastic when a cardboard structure with sterile, swappable lining might do just as well in non-windy areas.

you need to work backwards. ask yourself: are you trying to be vc funded or bootstrap. that alone will determine what kind of clients or markets you can serve. #1 ask yourself is the market growing or dying - I made a mistake once of making software for laundromats i.e dying market n run by old people. depending on which path you chose bootstrap or vc 1% customers of your total market can be enough to sustain yourself. on the bootstrapped level. if vc, better chop up vc money n live large

Anything relating to regulated banking. The challenger banks all have a chartered bank partner under the hood.

Licensed Banking: a there hasn’t been a new chartered banks in a decade

Also Clearing Brokerage. Credit Bureaus. US Core banking software, KYC providers(Eg:lexis nexus), bill pay providers

Also, The Fed

To solve for this one would need to create metrics around measuring markets and opportunities. I suggest the following three axes:

X. Market size (actual values, divisible into competitors) Y. Market valence (positive/negative consumer/user/customer/investor perceptions of each of the competitors; e.g., some sort of objectified, normalized product/service/company rating) Z. Market momentum (vectors of growth/shrinking/stagnation of the market overall, and each of the competitors within it, broken into actual past vs future projected)

Many times a market may not grow not because the market "isn't there," but because all of the existing offerings frankly stink. Imagine movies. If you have 12 terrible science fiction movies in a row, does that mean there's no market for science fiction movies, or does that mean someone finally needs to make a good science fiction movie?

You might also have to define more granular domains. Maybe the market might be for a geographic region, or a vertical or horizontal market sector.

1. For a low competition market I am looking at browser automation of user interaction. I recently created an original solution for a niche set of problems that incidentally solves many other more common problems.

2. The cool thing about this space is that it isn’t new technology that delivers 10x improvements. The opposite actually. 10x improvements are found by doing the least possible effort in a tiny library, scaling to support a wider problem space, and doing it substantial better than large products present in the marketplace.

The few competitors are easy to search but most of the commercial products are so expensive that it’s hard to really gauge the precise performance capabilities are the smaller players without a large financial investment.

3. I am just now learning about second order effects from this thing as I extend it to support execution across networks/VMs. There are all manner of second order surprises that emerge from better software automation.

anecdotal, but my roommate is a first year lawyer. A lot of his job is taking old legal docs and updating them for new deals. This is a lot of tedious search and replace and formatting in hard-to-edit PDFs.

A sample scenario is one of his senior colleagues takes a PDF and writes in some comments -- almost like a teacher grading an essay with a red pen, change this x to y, etc. This goes to my friend, who reviews, edits, and returns the draft by email. And there will be a lot of back and forth, plus other people making edits in real time.

watching this i can't help but notice how remarkably similar it is to programming, minus all the convenience of programming tools.

i don't know what the product or barriers are here, but these people could easily 10x if they knew about version control and markup languages.

A legal IDE. And diff-able doc formats.

That was the strength of WordPerfect in legal areas for many years. Formatting was special codes within a document and Wordperfect could generate Black lines in the margins to indicate changed lines.

A lot of firms still pay by the hour for such work, so there's little incentive for people to be more efficient at this.

Plus for people in the first few years, there's pressure to meet a billable hour quota - work like this pads the numbers.

Justin Kan created a legal business that attempted to be more efficient than a traditional law firm, but it seems that venture folded. I’d be interested in a post-morten and if he thinks there is any innovation on the current law firm business model.

https://www.techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-down/amp/

If they're using PDFs, they're doing it wrong.

Most law firms are fully integrated into the MS Office ecosystem. Even with emailing things back and forth, the Track Changes feature in Word does a decent enough job. (Although transactional lawyers will say it's the bane of their existence.) More advanced firms will use a document management system to save and back up documents to the cloud, and such a system usually also has built-in version control. So, the main technical problem with lawyers emailing back and forth has to do with the fact that no standard exists for the industry for document management, so these document management systems don't talk to each other. Even if the firms are using the same system, the functionality that would allow collaboration between opposing lawyers is terrible, at best.

More importantly, the real barrier to innovations in the legal industry has to do with economics. Lawyers get paid by the hour, so there's almost no incentive to become more efficient. Large clients can demand efficiency in the form of slashing the final legal bill by up to 40-50% sometime.

Finally, even the smallest changes introduce professional liability risks, so lawyers tend to stick to well known and understood processes that have withstood the test of time. Unless there's a concrete, nontrivial incentive for a lawyer to try something new, you're not going to find one voluntarily sticking his neck out in the name of innovation.

If there's an industry that massive savings [to the client] can be had with technological innovations, the legal industry would undoubtedly be it. But for the reasons stated above, startups working in this space will run out of money long before they could introduce meaningful changes.

Read up on Atrium if you want to understand more about the Tech x Legal space: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-down/

I work in this niche. I actually work a niche within this niche, and have implemented solutions. We do have a couple competitors. But most new players in this arena come in with exactly that statement - "oh, this is like programming, lets bring in markdown and git and solve all the things!" Then they realize that the level of detail and the expectations of legal document authors are far higher than they ever expected. Markdown doesn't cut it. HTML doesn't cut it. CKEditor and tinyMCE don't cut it. We spend a huge amount of effort re-writing plugins for those editors to meet the actual expectations, and defining new data formats for all the citations and interlinking of legal documents.

Not that there isn't room for competition - there is. But the barriers are not what people expect. And the easy answers that coders tend to see aren't the real problems.

Wouldn't LaTeX work in this situation?

How I love this comment. I do socials for CKEditor and read almost everything there is to read for WYSIWYG rich text editing, collaborating.(a little late this time)Feedback, frustrations, feature requests. I'm sad to read CKEditor doesn't cut it because I'm able to see in first hand how much effort goes into it. But I'm not surprised because I still have "I would have never guessed" moments about all the ways people use the editors myself. There is ALWAYS room for improvement when it comes to writing on web and feedback from users like you are crucial :)

I'm a corporate lawyer and I've written an essay on this[1]. Contracts have surprisingly similarities to code. This means: what if the process of drafting a contract was updated to be closer to the process of building software? Definitely an opportunity here IMO.

[1]mkjung.com/contracts

Here's a list you might be interested in:

- home services: lawn mowing, pest control, firewood delivery

- vehicle services: mobile oil change, mobile tire sales, locksmith

- event/seasonal services: catering, event management, tent rentals

- entertainment: bike tours, party rentals, hunting guides

- personal care: mobile haircuts, mobile makeup, mobile massages

- training/coaching/consulting: pet training, college application consulting, credit repair consulting

- trades/construction: electrical, plumbing, carpenting

- business services: videography, bookkeeping, junk removal

- real estate transactions: moving services, realtor, vacation rental management

Source: https://sweatystartup.com/businesses-i-love/

Makes me happy to see sweatystartup linked on HN :-)

*source: jobs where you are paid the minimum wage, but maybe you can cut that down a little by building a rent-seeking company.

the only things which might remotely be well paid (trades/construction) generally have some relatively high hurdles in most countries.

>*source: jobs where you are paid the minimum wage, but maybe you can cut that down a little by building a rent-seeking company.

You're assuming that people in these jobs get paid minimum wage and that the only way to be profitable is to undercut their wages. By offering better service, you can raise your rates and pay your employees better. But something tells me you knew that already and you're just saying toxic things to discourage people from trying.

well, except for the mentioned trades, they are all lifestyle businesses and luxury things. With 80% of the population not being able to afford this regularly (and being super price concious) and a large portion of the remaining 20% being chronic sociopaths you have to be very lucky to find someone who pays you well and treats you like a human.

Commercial and military aviation lol. Trust me it's by design. And you don't want to get into this market.

You should read this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

You should look for markets where a reconfiguration of leading technology could serve a new market that existing leaders in the space are unable to service due to structural necessities in their own established business models.

Trying to compete against incumbents by improving what they are already making progress on (sustaining innovations) is nearly impossible because they've set themselves up to be leaders in incremental innovation already.

Disruptive markets are so because they emerge at profit margins and market sizes much too small for large existing organizations to justify servicing, and also the new products do not meet the requirements of the established customer-base. Eventually, there is a chance that the disruptive technology will intersect with mainstream customer requirements and this is where customers begin to see the 10x benefits you're looking into, much further down the road.

The least competitive markets don't exist yet, the next least are tiny. These attract the smallest and least well funded competition.

It has been my (unfortunately frequent) experience that funeral homes are almost universally owned by individual families.

It's actually not true, but the real owner, Service Corp International, wants you to think so.

> SCI then retains the funeral home's original name, often along with former owners who are kept on as management. A typical funeral home that is owned by SCI will not contain advertisements or logos for SCI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Corporation_Internatio...

Interesting to know. Thanks for the link.

Edit: actually that doesn’t seem to be correct.

Eighty-nine percent of funeral homes in the U.S. are owned by individuals, families, or closely held private corporations. The remaining 11 percent are owned by corporations whose stock is publicly traded.

From Wikipedia:

In the 1960s, a push for large companies acquiring smaller funeral homes and cemeteries occurred.[18] Although there has been a consistent push for consolidation, the majority of the industry still consists of small, family-owned businesses.[18] Experts and analysts of the industry have estimated that the top six funeral operators control 25 to 30% of all funeral services in North America, with the top four owning between 15 and 20% of all funeral homes.

My bad. I thought they owned more than half of the whole market.

> It's surprisingly hard to get a "map" of existing markets, but am curious about those the community can readily identify.

Startup idea. Automate this analysis and sell the aggregate. No one wants to do this work, but if you had a trustworthy source to exhaust all info for a niche or corner of the market, that would be cool.

I would love to have such a tool. I was quietly waiting for others to validate the idea.

Isn't this what all those "market intelligence" firms sell? Point is only established companies want to pay for it.

I've met startup founders who pay for this data to help in writing their go-to-market strategy for series A.

I really wonder how much friction there is in using a market research firm and if that's a big deterrent to a lot of potential customers.

These firms have to guard their data. It’s all they have. So yeah they put up big walls and add lots of hurdles (calls, agreements, phases, etc) to increase the perceived value of what they are selling you.

If this data was more accessible, it would definitely be a game changer.

Finding it and presenting it and making it explorable is the really hard part.

Honestly, even if I knew of a bunch of potential markets I'm not sure I would won't you to know. Your motivation isn't that you care about a particular market or problem. It seems your just looking for the most efficient way to 10x your profit. Dispite knowing much about the people/ product/ market you may serve.

I've lost count of the things that I have used in the past that I have stopped using because the product sucks now and is of lower quality or they have blessed me with a subscription model that only cost $5 or $10 a month. Instead of sucking it up and paying for something once I have to die by a thousand cuts and pay for something the rest of my life if I want to use it. Sure it's great for the profits of that company but not for me.

So maybe that's the underserved market. A product that respects privacy and leaves you the heck alone.

A market with no competition is a monopoly. They are characterised by extremely high barriers to entry.

You are better off finding something you are passionate about in a competitive market, then working out how you will differentiate and market it with the budgets you have to work with.

Encrypted Messaging / File transmission / IOT control.

Current messaging solutions have different issues.

1. Not encrypted.

2. Transmission is encrypted but they are centralized, the message is open in the server.

3. End to end encryption but susceptible to block because some signaling/presence is towards a shard of central servers.

4. The infrastructure relays on well know properties of IP/TCP (proxies, ports...).

5. the packet has some well know properties (checksums, structure...) that allows to be identified and blocked.

5. Authentication and peer identity discovery.

There was a time (early 2000s) where Skype was a headache for system administrators, because it was able to pass any firewall and the conversations were able to pass. That is missed in the current world.

None of the current solutions, telegram, line, whatsapp, skype, email... can pass the previous checklist.

Utilities have a very low level of competition, but that's because they are granted an exclusive charter by the government. Private industry still competes in various roundabout ways, such as solar panel installation, and batteries that can game peak/of-peak times.

Great strategy - you are saving yourself a lot of time with this approach.

What's the value of a good "map" of an existing market? What are you willing to pay for one?

I feel that maps of existing least competitive markets are low in competition.

I don't have any experience or insights of it, but the very first thing that came up to my mind is: frame glasses.

I've heard multiple times already that price margins are huge at that one, and nobody are determined enough to offer lower prices for them.

But that's only what I've heard from here and there, I'm not into that topic "that much" to confirm that - OP asked for some suggestions, so I gave one ;)

Film cameras. Dominated by ARRI, a 100 year-old company whose worth is ~250m. There were disruptions (red, sony, etc.), but they regained dominance rather quickly (one semi-metric is oscar nominees which cameras are used, as well as top 500 grossing films over a year). Similar stuff in the same industry with services and lenses with Panavision (rental only) and dollies (Chapman Leonard, also rental only).

Or even digital imaging, which is a new technology forced onto an otherwise very conservative industry.

As an example, think of TSMC's upcoming 3nm process. It has a density of 300 million transistors per square millimetre. A Canon 5DS R has a 50 MPix resolution, which works out to about 60K photosites per square millimetre. That's a "budget" of 5,000 transistors per photosite!

That's more than enough to do "digital sensing". That is: accumulating photons in a digital counter instead of using an analog capacitor, allowing unlimited dynamic range. There would be no such thing as sensor saturation, allowing unlimited "electronic ND filter" effects without the colors being distorted even in a long time-lapse. It would allow "steering" of the data to nearby accumulators through an on-chip network at megahertz rates, providing near-perfect digital shake reduction without having to physically move the chip. Shake reduction could track moving objects and avoid blur even for very long hand-held exposures with cars or people in the scene, the same as what the Google Pixel does, but at a far higher quality. The motion vectors could be fed into a video compression stage, improving picture quality to above what the compressors can normally achieve by "guessing" the motion from 24fps still frames.

Etc, etc...

What does this mean...you still need some sort of analog capacitor to collect photons and convert them to electrons.

So instead of an ADC converting an analogue charge level to a 14-bit or 16-bit signal from a "big" capacitor, you instead have a tiny capacitor (or none at all) and collect individual 1-bit signals and accumulate them digitally. Photon counting, in essence.

so what kind of collecting device do you propose then?

I'm not sure what market you have in mind here. If you're talking about "the hardware used to shoot movies and TV shows", that disruption already happened with the move to digital.

If you're talking about "cinematography using chemical film", it's not clear to me that there is much of a market for that. Film looks amazing, but it's a huge headache to work with and expensive to process. If it was what filmmakers wanted (where "want" takes cost into account), I don't think they would have abandoned it.

There's a lot more to shooting movies than cameras. I have a client who has an interesting take on camera cranes. Unfortunately, COVID has pretty much shut down his market for now.

My uninformed guess is legal "engineering", such as tariff engineering. Discovering the cheapest way to manufacture goods / run your business given the most up to date legal landscape. To some respects, privacy companies that help you navigate GDPR/CPA are in this category, but there's plenty of space here (immigration, copyright, zoning, etc).

This appears to be the IKEA practice, they less of a retailer and more of an global tax avoidance scheme

Dog-walking. My roommate used to make six figures by setting up standing dog walking appointments for affluent clients. She only worked six hours a day. Note that this was before the days of Rover which probably dominates the market in large cities, but I suspect suburbs and rural areas still need help.

I think there is definitely a place to compete against incumbent gig work companies with local alternatives. In the dog walking example, some people are willing to pay a premium to get the same person every time. Or, at my local dog park, a person brings a bunch of dogs and let's them play in the park for an hour instead of walking them.

I definitely believe this could be the path to carving out small lifestyle businesses.

Might be an opportunity there. Find repeat customers. Find dogs that play well together and aren't hard work. Specialise in very particular areas around parks that suit the operation. Decline dogs that make the process too difficult.

Letterbox drop around existing clients and parks to find more close by. Offer volume discounts for referring neighbouring dogs.

Take said dogs to park and let them run around while you operate your other businesses from your phone.

> Take said dogs to park and let them run around while you operate your other businesses from your phone.

This doesn't sound like responsible dog handling.

No, that last bit was a joke. Working from your phone while your charges are playing is more what most parents do!

Look for companies that have niche solutions for legacy platforms that aren’t going anywhere like insurance systems, DMVs, social services etc.

Sometimes you can buy some little company that does something minor like format print output for some ancient mainframe and the extract more money or find complimentary sales.

Medical imaging like MRI. Put it in a truck trailer and tour the underserved communities.

Unfortunately, States have medical device approval hurdles which often explicitly consider competition, and prohibit the economic competition.

MRIs draw a boatload of power to keep liquid helium liquid, even when "off".. just account for a pretty big generator in that truck, and make very sure you don't get stranded without heavy power overnight.

[1] https://www.cocir.org/fileadmin/6_Initiatives_SRI/Measuremen...

Take a look at Costar (Commercial Real Estate Data / GIS Demographics)

For many regional and regulatory burdened fields (e.g. ISPs), be the "Stripe Atlas" making it easier for others to compete.

I would argue cannabis is not competitive, other than getting a license. All you have to do is produce and test a product and it is usually sold. The players not making it in production usually cannot produce or have problems during production (low bag appeal, bugs, genetics, employees, quality of cure, etc). Sure, it costs a million in business licensing and fees, but if you can competently do it, you will succeed and your competition can't do much [legally] to stop you.

I think there is a market for privacy.

I think GIS falls into this.

Second GIS. ESRI is ripe for disruption.

ArcGIS has a formidable feature-set to clone and users will want them all. I believe that's their moat?

While I don't know about GIS specifically, I work in a similar field where the market leaders have an enormous feature set accumulated over many decades - some from the 1960's and never stopped growing. But I squeezed in with the main basic features first then as I got customers, added what they wanted and continually grew it. My advantages are price and ease of use. Users didn't need to go on a training course without all those features to learn. Many of the features of the big boys are so niche that most customers never need them, or are obsolete but retained for legacy, or are just not really essential.

Can I take a look at your product? I would be curious what a minimal ArcGIS would look like and how long it would take to build. GIS is super edge-casey, I think.

No sorry. I've created too embarrassing a trail of HN comments to want to link this identity to my livelihood. But it's not actually GIS, just a similar sort of product. It might be that an equally minimal GIS really too feature-poor to be any use at all.

Got create your own, sometimes there is a category of problem that can be solved you just need to find it, that one will be least competitive

ISPs.

Seconding this.

Google already tried and sort of failed/

Medical care.

You want medicine, you need to pay someone who's part of the Physician cartel, a pharmacy, a pharmacist, and whoever has the patent.

With computers and science you often need 0 of these except the manufacturer of the drug.

Personalized medical research, n-of-one therapies that you can (with help) self-administer, and other types of, perhaps at this point, "gray-market" medical care could be profitable.

At least one person tried this and found it to be a very hard sell: https://tjcx.me/posts/i-wasted-40k-on-a-fantastic-startup-id...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com