I would argue that it’s not just about solving a customer problem, it’s solving it at a cost enough customers are willing to pay for. There’s lots of solutions

I would argue that it’s not just about solving a customer problem, it’s solving it at a cost enough customers are willing to pay for. There’s lots of solutions in the market for problems I have, but most are above the cost I’m willing to pay for. As long as you have a large enough market willing to pay you can sustain it but often the solutions are just too costly in general to be sustainable. And that critical part of bringing a useful solution at a cost the market will bear to sustain is the hard engineering part. I find problems people have daily that I can think of solutions to, but they’re often going to be too costly to be of any value to create a solution for and I often find them too unique for scaling to help any. I work in research environments, so YMMV. In the past I worked with an ideas person, but their ideas were often quickly discounted by some basic engineering thoughts about how reasonable solutions could be built. If you have an engineering background and ideas, you can often iterate through viable ideas much faster, quickly discounting unviable ideas vs the other way around (having to do a lot of practical homework to explore practicality of an idea is more time costly). There is absolutely domain value in understanding unique problems and seeing opportunity, no doubt, but viable solutions need to exist. If you think you’re the first person who saw and identified an opportunity, it’s a great time to look and ask around because chances are you’re often not the first to market. Often solutions or businesses don’t exist for the very point I raise: people couldn’t find cost effective solutions to make it worth pursuing.