19 ms·

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

• flaque 6y ago
  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).
  • wombatpm 6y ago
    This appears to be the IKEA practice, they less of a retailer and more of an global tax avoidance scheme
• slantaclaus 6y ago
  Take a look at Costar (Commercial Real Estate Data / GIS Demographics)
• thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
  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.
  • kube-system 6y ago
    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.
    • PeterCorless 6y ago
      "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.
      • kube-system 6y ago
        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!
        • trevett 6y ago
          I think someone should start a thread asking about all the one-offs people have written and see how much duplication there is.
• claudiulodro 6y ago
  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.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • pklausler 6y ago
    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.
    • SkyPuncher 6y ago
      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.
    • claudiulodro 6y ago
      Interestingly, this is the problem online reviews were supposed to solve.
      • ozim 6y ago
        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.
• disambiguation 6y ago
  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.
  • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    A legal IDE. And diff-able doc formats.
    • wombatpm 6y ago
      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.
  • dhr 6y ago
    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.
    • travmatt 6y ago
      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/ https://www.techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-down/amp/
• Animats 6y ago
  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.
  • trevett 6y ago
    It seems there are 19 codes: https://www.naics.com/search-naics-codes-by-industry/ 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.
    • Animats 6y ago
      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 https://www.naics.com/code-search/?naicstrms=video [2] https://www.google.com/basepages/producttype/taxonomy-with-ids.en-US.txt https://www.google.com/basepages/producttype/taxonomy-with-i...
      • trevett 6y ago
        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.
• this2shallPass 6y ago
  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?
  • joshuamarksmith 6y ago
    I feel that maps of existing least competitive markets are low in competition.
• pieno 6y ago
  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.
• skmurphy 6y ago
  The least competitive markets don't exist yet, the next least are tiny. These attract the smallest and least well funded competition.
• keiferski 6y ago
  It has been my (unfortunately frequent) experience that funeral homes are almost universally owned by individual families.
  • listenallyall 6y ago
    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_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Corporation_Internatio...
    • keiferski 6y ago
      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.
      • listenallyall 6y ago
        My bad. I thought they owned more than half of the whole market.
• kraig911 6y ago
  Commercial and military aviation lol. Trust me it's by design. And you don't want to get into this market.
• maxk42 6y ago
  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.
  • ryanchants 6y ago
    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.
    • prawn 6y ago
      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.
      • FartyMcFarter 6y ago
        > 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.
        • prawn 6y ago
          No, that last bit was a joke. Working from your phone while your charges are playing is more what most parents do!
• adrr 6y ago
  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
  • toufique 6y ago
    Also, The Fed
• atarian 6y ago
  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/ https://sweatystartup.com/businesses-i-love/
  • HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
    Makes me happy to see sweatystartup linked on HN :-)
  • fock 6y ago
    *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.
    • atarian 6y ago
      >*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.
      • fock 6y ago
        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.
• faangFar 6y ago
  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.
  • James_Henry 6y ago
    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.
  • wtracy 6y ago
    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-idea/ https://tjcx.me/posts/i-wasted-40k-on-a-fantastic-startup-id...
• tedmcory77 6y ago
  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.
• jrumbut 6y ago
  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!).
  • trevett 6y ago
    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.
  • shivaas 6y ago
    this is tangential to the problem https://www.ganaz.com/ 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.
  • pkkim 6y ago
    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.
• jmchuster 6y ago
  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.
• Keyframe 6y ago
  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).
  • jiggawatts 6y ago
    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...
    • tarlinian 6y ago
      What does this mean...you still need some sort of analog capacitor to collect photons and convert them to electrons.
      • jiggawatts 6y ago
        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.
• tcmb 6y ago
  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.
  • trevett 6y ago
    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.
    • tcmb 6y ago
      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.
  • nojs 6y ago
    If you can remember the title of the book I’d love to read it.
    • tcmb 6y ago
• bobosha 6y ago
  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 https://learn.blueoceanstrategy.com
• mamcx 6y ago
  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 :).
• kirillzubovsky 6y ago
  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/how-did-flexport-get-its-first-customers https://smashnotes.com/p/y-combinator/e/92-ryan-petersen/s/h...)
  • abi 6y ago
    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 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/ https://abiraja.com/the-landing-page-method/
    • system2 6y ago
      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.
      • abi 6y ago
        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).
• quickthrower2 6y ago
  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!
  • PopeDotNinja 6y ago
    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.
  • siquick 6y ago
    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.
    • quickthrower2 6y ago
      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)
• ideals 6y ago
  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.
  • tmaly 6y ago
    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.
  • brailsafe 6y ago
    So, you wouldn't really be liable for this right?
    • imtringued 6y ago
      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.
  • 6y ago
• Spooky23 6y ago
  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.
• dzonga 6y ago
  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
• m3kw9 6y ago
  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
• kyawzazaw 6y ago
  I think GIS falls into this.
  • nknealk 6y ago
    Second GIS. ESRI is ripe for disruption.
    • trevett 6y ago
      ArcGIS has a formidable feature-set to clone and users will want them all. I believe that's their moat?
      • lopmotr 6y ago
        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.
        • trevett 6y ago
          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.
          • lopmotr 6y ago
            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.
• PeterCorless 6y ago
  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.
• missedthecue 6y ago
  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.
• whalesalad 6y ago
  > 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.
  • trevett 6y ago
    I would love to have such a tool. I was quietly waiting for others to validate the idea.
  • mNovak 6y ago
    Isn't this what all those "market intelligence" firms sell? Point is only established companies want to pay for it.
    • trevett 6y ago
      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.
      • whalesalad 6y ago
        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.
• vsskanth 6y ago
  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.
  • trevett 6y ago
    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?
    • vsskanth 6y ago
      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.
      • trevett 6y ago
        Curious which applications require logging at high sample rates vs. doing event-based?
        • vsskanth 6y ago
          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.
• apapli 6y ago
  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.
• rsweeney21 6y ago
  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 https://www.facet.net)
  • trevett 6y ago
    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).
• JTbane 6y ago
  ISPs.
  • mNovak 6y ago
    Seconding this.
  • google234123 6y ago
    Google already tried and sort of failed/
• austincheney 6y ago
  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.
• muzani 6y ago
  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.
  • ponker 6y ago
    90 paying users is cool but I wouldn’t say it “really blew up”
    • muzani 6y ago
      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.
      • pknerd 6y ago
        How did you perform market research for a country like Malaysia. Was your idea based on some personal observations?
        • muzani 6y ago
          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.
• landemva 6y ago
  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.
  • mNovak 6y ago
    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/Measurement/COCIR_SRI_-_MRI_measurement_of_energy_consumption_2012.pdf https://www.cocir.org/fileadmin/6_Initiatives_SRI/Measuremen...
• nosmokewhereiam 6y ago
  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.
• rsecora 6y ago
  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.
  • mlvljr 6y ago
    How did Skype do it back then?
• jariel 6y ago
  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.
  • trevett 6y ago
    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.
• mNovak 6y ago
  For many regional and regulatory burdened fields (e.g. ISPs), be the "Stripe Atlas" making it easier for others to compete.
• m463 6y ago
  I think there is a market for privacy.
• lukaszkups 6y ago
  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 ;)
• bingobongo1 6y ago
  You should read this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma 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.
• eaandkw 6y ago
  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.