I know of two ways: - do consulting work and build custom software until you have a good sense for the problems. Once you know what customers want, throw away

I know of two ways: - do consulting work and build custom software until you have a good sense for the problems. Once you know what customers want, throw away everything you coded and re-implement as a product. It is very difficult to reach escape velocity this way - you will be very dependent on consulting revenue, making it hard to stop consulting and work on product. But if you don't know the domain, this is your best bet. - make a product that an employee in your target market could/would pay for themselves. Once you have a product users love, you can work out enterprise features like on-site deployment and system/data integration. The individual user revenue will finance your development, and sustain you through the infamous "enterprise software sales cycle", and its longer, more painful cousin the "enterprise software deployment cycle". If you want ideas: pick a target industry, then talk to users. Literally ask them what frustrates them about their work. Life in the enterprise is _full_ of frustration, it doesn't take long to find a good problem to work on :). The harder part is picking the right target industry. My advice is to pursue customers you admire. You want to love meeting and talking to your customers, since you'll spend a lot of time obsessing over them...