"not all startups have to become the next google or the next unicorn" No, but you do have to survive. That's hard enough for any company, but it's much harder

"not all startups have to become the next google or the next unicorn" No, but you do have to survive. That's hard enough for any company, but it's much harder when you pick a small target market that can't be trivially replicated in other verticals. So sure, pick a problem that you know well, but be realistic about the achievable market size, and don't start a business that requires huge scale to work (i.e. a search engine), when your target market is tiny. (Also, as in all things, beware survivorship bias: just because counterexamples to what I'm saying exist, does not mean that the likelihood of creating one is high. Nor does it mean that the counterexamples are doing as well as you think they are.)