It was ~20 years ago but i don't think the year matters as much as the luck of having an opportunity to step into (easily bootstrap-able) vs needing to force an

It was ~20 years ago but i don't think the year matters as much as the luck of having an opportunity to step into (easily bootstrap-able) vs needing to force an opportunity (VC funding required). I think there are still opportunities out there for the former regardless of the year. I don't know them or I'd take them but I'm sure there's someone out there "if i could just get software to do X, we could sell Y". My own story: I knew people working in telecommunications who couldn't sell satellite terminals because the customer needed more than just a naked satellite modem and data plan. I met the first customer sent my way, charged appropriately and got them a solution. Think solar panels, battery, small embedded SOC, a database to write to and a frontend website to access the data. Surprisingly that only took a couple of weeks to get a prototype together (yay for startup agility and my own hacker knowledge!) and the Telco sold a lot of satellite terminals from that and they realized it was a good idea to send more customers in a similar predicament my way. Eventually it spun up from there and we bought the original small time Telco that was referring us (software pays!) so we could gain the monthly recurring subscription we generated on top of the software consulting costs. We're now one of the main people to go to for this sort of thing. I think there's still these sorts of opportunities out there today. If you're thinking the way to do a startup is to force a new market using VC funding there's other opportunities just sitting there that can spin up more organically. In fact the bootstrap-able opportunities are probably more likely to succeed imho since they tend to spin up from an existing need while the "Uber for X" type of VC funding try to force a market to exist where none has before.