In the early 2000’s, you could throw up a calculator. A todo list. A forum. An affiliate marketing page (a blog). A favicon generator. An image combiner. A love calculator. A timer. Etc…Now a days, the kinds of product required to be “minimally viable” is beyond what an average developer can program by themselves, in a reasonable amount of time.
There are some niche cases, but just think about it. What are you going to build, that doesn’t already exist, and how are you going to market it, make people pay for it, afford it yourself, and offer a seamless experience? We have every social media site. Every video streaming site. Every audio streaming site. There isn’t a single tool I personally use, that I can’t just google, and find 20 companies offering it with a generous free-tier.
It’s kind of like comparing the person who invented the fork, to the person who invented the air fryer. in 2023, you can’t just bend some sharp metal, an make a MVP. Shit’s gotten harder, and harder, and harder.
I thought that by focusing on a niche and taking dedicated actions, I thought that it’s possible but after reading this, I reflected on how many such cases I have actually seen and now I’m a bit insecure. wonder how you guys are thinking.
I’m a professional software engineer, and I work on everything from physical devices to mobile apps. The longer a technology exists, the less “low hanging fruit” problems remain that can be solved with that technology. Identifying a niche problem is generally more viable, but not very easy to do. Identifying a niche problem that you can solve yourself is harder. Identifying a niche problem that you can effectively sell your solution to for a profit is even harder.
Honestly, I think the better approach is to focus on new technologies that not many people understand. The newer a technology is, and the less people that know how to use it, the more “low hanging fruit” problems there are. Look at how many companies have tried to make use of neural networks, blockchains, ChatGPT, etc. If you can understand something new before most people even know it exists, you should be able to identify problems that nobody has yet tried to solve with that new thing.