Is finding gaps just hard now? As a 24 yo, everything seems to be done already

Early 2000s it was: just put it online and it will sell, at a time when online businesses were still new.

Paul Graham's Y Combinator was: create a good product and it will sell, at a time when online businesses were these half-assed 2000s era products.

AirBnB/Uber's generation is: get a fuck ton of funding and do mildly illegal shit fast, and then use your funding and lawyers to rewrite the law. So called "disruption".

(I am not going to mention OpenAI and other AI startups because they are a class of their own.)

There is a reason why Zapier has 5 billion dollar valuation, and its basically just a bunch of api calls from a technical perspective.

Consider looking into a Ph.D. if you’re hungry to find, master, and close a gap. Not being sarcastic, btw.

The more you know, the more you realize how little you know and how many gaps there are in your field.

Then what you’ll see is there are A LOT of snake oil salesman (just pour some AI on it). There is also just a lot of bad quality/ limitations in almost all products. Solving practical, sometimes boring, problems, in a way that actually consistently delights users, is actually by far the exception.

Only by learning the domain, and trying to solve it, ideally with yourself as the main user, can you cut through all the BS and noise.

In other words care more about a domain first, be of service to people in that domain, try to solve problems with existing tools. You’ll see there gaps. The real problems/products will fall out naturally.

That's how all markets start. Every product or startup needs to start off as a very targeted application because otherwise you will drown in complexity and lack of strategy, but with a forward facing vision on how to expand into adjacent problem spaces.

$TECHNOLOGICAL_APPLICATION for $SPECIFIC_INDUSTRY is always the best method to start building out a product, and expanding from there.

> Is finding gaps just hard now

No.

You might just not be looking hard enough. Try and find specific problems in a domain you are very experienced in.

Also be open to pivot if needed. For example, Slack started off as a chat-app within a failed videogame.

"The Encyclopedia of World Problems"

https://uia.org/encyclopedia#:~:text=The%20Encyclopedia%20of....

Spend a decade in any industry and you will see the gaps more clearly.

Paul Graham points out that some niches are "the Microsoft Basic" of something much bigger. And, of course, some niches aren't. But if you're looking at is as "what thing that's bigger can this be the doorway to", you're more likely to find something that's more than just that little niche.

Think of how often you hear people complain about something. Every single complaint is an opportunity… something that hasn’t been solved well enough yet. The more people who complain, the bigger the potential opportunity.

Given the way digital infrastructure exists as is today, this is a freakishly difficult problem.

In other words - how'd you make digital systems all around you "attention-enhancing" rather than "attention-diluting"

Here's my back-burner side-project: software to track materials being checked in or out, like a tool crib or maybe a library. Exists in many forms already, but mine's better :-)

Hiring people is really really hard (when was the last time you hired an expert to do something)? Coordinating people is really really hard. (These are problems facing every company, government, and group of people in the world). There is now way we're at a optimum.

Most systems were created, and then became stuck robots should - buy my groceries, move my money, book my events, schedule my events, suggest events, tell me what to buy, book my flights .... All of this is possible, it's just not automated :(. And frequently the barrier is data access.

More of my day is consumed by things that could be automated, but are not.

is there anything that improves people's lives in the long-term as much as fixing education? there are plenty of niche sectors to excel on, feels like taking a candy from a baby

angels/VCs tell me it's too big of a market, thus competitive, thus you'll get eaten. I disagree with the last part -- we all say execution is key, but few of us realize what that means: the whole collection of decisions a company makes defines its 'execution', so each company is unique, even if they're redoing something that already exists. you can specialize so much no one will care competing with you early

as long as the inefficiencies in edu everywhere scream for help and the access to edu/work opportunity is not evenly distributed world-wide, there's huge room for innovation, and I'd add it's even a mandatory mission for us crazy visionaries to fix that

And that's ignoring all the bits of tech we use every day that could just be a lot better. JVM build systems are a mess, there is a serious need for competition there, to pick just one example that bothers me regularly.

Once you get into the swing of it the problem is not gonna be finding ideas. The problem will be finding ideas that other people will pay for. That's the hardest constraint.

It's indeed easier to be early than being smart, and of course those people are both.

In my experience: Everything always seems like it is already done, until something changes in the world, and then a bunch of obvious gaps emerge.

Which is to say that it is quite possible that earlier people did have it easier than what you are experiencing right now, but that doesn't mean it was always easy for them. They had to wait for the right moment.

The gaps will find you when they are ready. The bigger challenge is in being ready to accept them when they come. From what I have seen, when the obvious gaps start to come, you start getting pulled in a lot of different directions and, if not properly focused, can easily see the opportunity go by.

Here's an article from 2012 on the subject of "everything seems to be done already"

A few years after this article was published. Google did "AlphaGo" and later "Alphazero" for chess.

OpenAI was founded in 2015.

OpenBCI kickstarter was in 2014. They are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkWJem3LY5E

>I'm trying to find good problem statements and gaps to solve, Tech/Non-Tech.

What you're coming up against is starting to be better understood. Some people don't get ideas. Other people, that's all they get.

>It seems like people earlier had it much easier and the ideas seemed a bit obvious. This sounds envious, and could be somewhat wrong. But I truly am still trying to figure out a good gap.

Universities struggle with this a great deal. The people earning their degrees are often extremely underemployed because they cant come up with ideas OR they can't execute on the ideas.

I'm a fail to execute type of person lol. I have tons of ideas.

Fully automated agriculture building that takes water and electricity in and outputs food. Could be built anywhere, thus the extremes of droughty africa or arctic lattitudes.

Cultured meats, just the real deal type of meat, not this cancerous plant fake stuff.

Clean enough water production, less then 1% of the world's water is sort of clean enough.

Wearable tech is on the verge of finding something viable. Samsung/oura rings are kind of there, but what about a necklace?

Someone needs to find a good use for quantum computing.

Lots of room for next gen batteries, grid scale battery storage, or nuclear fusion work.

Plastic alternatives are in major need.

How about medical devices which never pierce into your body? hyposprays? sensors?

remote/wireless power distribution will be huge.

exoskeletons as mobolity scooters?

fully automated road construction that doesnt need employees?

a small drone driver/car with machine ai, that can drive around bike pathes and parks to clean up garbage? No people needed.

the electric airplane industry? That's going to happen in the next couple decades.

unmanned blimps that can move heavy cargo?

Who knows if there's any good ideas there. probably all trash.

30 years ago we had other challenges. For starters computers were "rare" (by today's standards). So you first had to convince buyers that "computerization" is a thing.

We also didn't have things like always-on networks, or OS-level printing. (Fun fact, my first payed gig was writing a program that could draw a diagram and print it on one specific printer model, an HP Laserjet 2.)

Anytime there is a new platform, (think dos/windows/web/mobile) there are opportunities to enter the market. For example we built a business app for windows circa 1997. It's been constantly developed since then. We gained a foothold in the early days, and are now a big player in our space.

But -entering- markets is harder. We entered a mature market with a different product in 2014. While we were a lot better, it was very (very) hard to break into the market dominated by 2 existing players. We have made progress, but frankly it's hard going.

So when looking for new things, it's helpful to first identify new markets. Timing this us hard, but if you hit the sweetspot it can work. That said, betting on a platform is risky (as Twitter API consumers discovered.)

You've already seen a flood of AI products, and you can expect a LOT more in the next couple years. It's the closest thing to a new platform in a while. Of course in 10 years that market will have consolidated and 99% will be gone. It's certainly a risky space, but worth a punt if it interests you. Hard to stand out though.

Finding new markets 30 years ago was easy. Finding new markets today is much, much harder. The niches are by implication much, much smaller.

That said niches exist. And getting a foothold in one niche can lead to it growing, or take you into another niche etc.

Selling into niches now is easy. My HP program was only useful for people doing genetics research, who submitted papers with genealogy diagrams, and happened to have an HP Laserjet. Talk about a niche market, Before those folk were on the internet...

Today I am, if anything, even more niche. I sell to a potential market of maybe 2000 people world-wide. I reach maybe 10% of that. But it makes a decent living. Not VC decent, but I do ok.

I would encourage you though by "trying things out". Find a niche, however small, and plug it. Then move in to another.

(Hint: at some point you'll discover that marketing matters more than coding. Getting good at marketing to niches is a killer-skill.)

Good luck.