You say it's luck. I say the universe is sending you lots of signals. Most people ignore those signals. The "lucky" ones are simply perceptive. To give you a

You say it's luck. I say the universe is sending you lots of signals. Most people ignore those signals. The "lucky" ones are simply perceptive. To give you a concrete example. There was this app Screenhero that was acquired by Slack in 2017. There was a HN thread about it and it erupted with people saying "oh no, I'm using this and it'll go away. how awful!". The thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15552042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15552042 333 points, 147 comments Just from that thread you could tell: * there's an app with obvious business model (monthly pay per user), immune to piracy (everything is mediated by their servers; no account, the app doesn't work) * the functionality was deemed valuable enough by Slack to acquire a startup that barely got off the ground * people love this app The Universe sent a clear signal. Hacker News is supposed to be a breeding ground for hackers that are interested in building software businesses. How many of the people that read the Slack HN acquisition thread fired up Visual Studio or XCode and started building a copy of Screenhero? Zero. Everyone ignored the signal. It's even worse than that. I actually made that point in 2017, in that same HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15555488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15555488 I spelled out the obvious opportunity for the tens of thousands of people who must have read that post. It was even the top voted comment. Everyone ignore the signal. BTW: "clone Screenhero" opportunity is mostly gone. Not completely but there are at least 2 startups cloning it. I'm pretty sure it took at least 2 years before they started copying Screenhero (one of the startups is actually by a guy from the original team, I think). So for at least 2 years there was a clear opportunity to build a multi-million dollar business by a very small team.