I’m new to this sub and I’ve done some poking around. It seems that the unanimous advice in this sub for people looking to become an entrepreneur is ‘find a problem and sell the solution’.
I’m from a poor family and I’m just a simple working folk. I’ve been trying to think of a way to break free from that life most of my adult years but have never found a way to make it happen.
So my question is. Since I’ve been trying to find a problem to solve for most of my life and failing to do so. How can I make a shift to really find that problem I can solve? It seems most people in here have businesses. What problem did you solve and how did you figure out that problem to begin with?
What would you call a lucrative niche?
Crab Boat Fleet Management SaaS
Like roofing. Build a business that’s built on quality of service and it’s a lucrative niche within the construction space.
Not trying to boil the ocean, just install a roof.
A high barrier-to-entry niche in a proven industry, which is more likely to have few competitors. If they’re doing really well, they can get lazy, not adapt to the latest technologies (they don’t have to because they’re already making good money), and let customer service lapse (customers have few other choices). That is a lucrative niche because the market is proven, there’s enough money being made to support the competitors, and there are clear things you can do to provide a better product or service.
That’s exactly what I found with an expensive product used at my job in an aviation niche. It was expensive, poorly designed and made, had just a handful of providers worldwide, and they were all making good money ($100M market). I eventually got about 5% of the market so I didn’t make billions, but I made millions.
I think existing, proven businesses that “only” might make you millions is a better and more straightforward path than trying to find some new billion dollar idea that has little chance of success.
This strategy is good but often can be rather hard and expensive because of the mentioned high barrier to entry? You need to be very good at attracting funds, talking to partners and investors and things like that, I guess?
I think it’s easiest to work in an industry and niche you’re interested in, get paid to learn everything about it, then branch out on your own within that niche. The barrier to entry is the domain knowledge, not startup funds necessarily.