Ask HN: How do you research obscure opportunities for business ventures? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you research obscure opportunities for business ventures?

14 pointsl2silver6 comments

Where do you get your information? Scholarly sources? Agency research reports? Do you compile your own statistics?

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For me, it was an invoice crossing over my desk many years ago.

- Questioned it.

- Started reading county and city ordinances.

- Realized that there was an opportunity.

- Confirmed it by making open data requests for the data I needed.

- Learned I can't sell for shit even w/ the perfect service/product.

Overall, I obtained data from over 20 sources to validate the idea, build the lead list, and attempt to sale the service/product. I'm not happily on v2 of it and have someone who can actually sell, which I'm stoked about!

Although I haven't hit success and financial freedom yet w/ this thing, the skills I've gained due to the research, data sourcing, spelunking of the data, and attempting to be a salesman has lead me to many other successful projects.

Tangent: Products and services serve a need. Find something that makes your curse and make it simpler or something. Cast a wide net of interests and find something that pisses you off and then try and make it not piss you off. Once you do that, see if there's a market for it.

There's a lot of literature on this sort of question. Many people start with a core idea and then iterate on it through various lenses to arrive at an execution path which will further change over time. Thus, in many cases concept ideation is less like 'immaculate conception', and rather more like enthusiastic learning and responding to new information to evolve rationally using increasingly complex and nuanced models.

Nominally objective information is often overrated and conservative investment and finance cultures often place undue emphasis on it. Instead of appeals to authority in citations, investors understand blue ocean markets exist, yesterday's statistics don't necessarily apply tomorrow and execution is king. They typically want big picture, order-of-magnitude, differentation and moats. Thus the semantic norm for investor-focused projections, if you need them in your space, is a section called 'assumptions' where well cited upper, lower and rational guesstimate values can be plugged in to the model to visualize potential returns.

What kind of literature? What are moats?

Statista is one resource that could get you started.

What the OP is saying is that, most of the time you don't know what will work. So one of the strategy is to start something based on sane guesstimates and then iterate on the idea until you find the solution(this is called, finding a "product market fit"). And to protect yourself from being rolled over by incumbents or other companies working in the same domain, you need something unique in your offerings that others can not replicate i.e you need to form a moat around your business.

From my exp, business models (google these words), are usually very simple, entrepreneurs are practice people, they don't dive deep.

And second, it is my favorite pastime, to figure out, how I will make money from some activity.

Sure, must be broad-minded, and agile, to see interest in obvious (learn drawing).

Once, you will see, that most activities where you don't see money from first look, are money-laundering or just imitation of business (for example, to make impression on relatives).

PS main business philosophy you could see in Star Trek episode "Treachery, Faith, and the Great River": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708654/

I think that the only viable approach is to do your own searching both widely and deeply and compile your own statistics. When you rely on easily accessible information then you are seeing the same data as, potentially, many others do.

In my experience, all the low hanging fruit has been picked over. The harder something gets the less competition you have.

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