There is a lot of possibility to carve your niche, although this is true for most software products (a product can be considered a market leader in one vertical

There is a lot of possibility to carve your niche, although this is true for most software products (a product can be considered a market leader in one vertical, yet almost unknown in another). Whether you choose to seek out a niche or not, you still need a novel approach. I know one search company that in 2000/2001 started building a solution that relied heavily on in-memory indexes. At the time memory was expensive but it was a smart play b/c it became cheap very quickly which gave them a huge advantage in the depth and breadth of calculations they could do. They got a contract with Verizon to provide search for superpages.com and became quite popular in the YP space. They were acquired in 2007. I mention the story because it's important to remember that there are many, many successful companies doing cool stuff that we've never heard about. That's the norm. The ones we do hear about are the outliers.