Examples:
- "The academic who hasn’t built anything, yet feels comfortable telling you to use their complicated startup framework to find and validate ideas." Presumably a dig at lean startup.
- "A market need? An underserved niche? Demand? WTF do these things even mean?" Come on, these aren't that hard to define.
So in other words, a market need or underserved niche.
They are desperate usually because it is a problem that affects their bottom line, prevents them completing a project at work, wastes an enormous amount of their time when doing something important to them, etc.
It must be a solution that, even when distilled to its very core, provides clear value to specific people you can identify. Just lighting on a vague market need or undeserved niche is not enough.
Not to say even purely passion projects can't succeed, but those are more hit-or-miss.
the thing about market needs / underserved niches / demand is that they are easy to sorta-define, but hard to actually define in a way that's useful when you are trying find them, when you actually need to understand them
the biggest unlock I've had was, 2+ years into pushing a product I had theoretically validated demand for, realizing that I didn't actually understand demand, and that demand SEEMS like it is "desire for a product" or "willingness to pay for a product" but is actually a product-agnostic thing, and when you see that, you see the world a lot more clearly. This video was super useful - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIZqim8iXU
Anyway thanks for the critique, 100% agree with half of it!