You can't, say, develop a local presence and become the best in your corner of the country, as you hit global competition from mature products right at the start.
What's everyone else's experience?
> Once you are the big fish in a very small pond then you want to jump over into a neighboring pond. The tendency is to immediately go mainstream, but you probably don’t yet have enough traction for that. Once we found success with a subset of fitness blogs I looked for others in a similar industry. So we went from interval training blogs, to running blogs, to powerlifting blogs. Then from there it’s easy to step into the diet/recipe blogs that have overlap.
Instead of trying to become the best in "your corner of the country", you could focus on the corner of some specific niches.
It forces people to come up with unique and better products for particular use cases. It allows people in poor underdeveloped areas to have access to global markets.
For my company for example, we work in Southern Oregon (one of the least industrially developed places on the West Coast), we have a support team in Costa Rica, a designer in India and we sell products nationally that people cannot find locally.
From a seller's perspective, I've made software that I found useful and nobody's ever willing to pay for it. The few times I did make money off software, it was because it was shiny, during the era when shiny software got attention and made money. And even then, it was short lived.
I personally think we've exhausted all categories of software possibilities. What society could really use now is to reinvent existing software in a reasonable way, with better principles:
- Make software much more interoperable with other software, and invent decent protocols for this.
- Make software less invasive of our lives, and less manipulative of our minds, moods, and attention spans.
- Make software that encourages you to get the job done and move on with your life, rather than optimizing for endless consumption.
Put another way, imagine there was no software at all right now, but we still know everything we know about software. And imagine avaricious people didn't call the shots, but the software engineers who care make the decisions. Imagine we could still collaborate with one another as fast as we do now. All you have is hardware and a bunch of specs and firmware. Now, what could humanity come up with?
That's what we should be working towards.
640k programs should be enough for everyone.
If you don’t put time, effort and ingenuity into sales and marketing you won’t get anybody to pay for your product or service, in the overwhelming majority of cases. If you build a better mousetrap the world will not beat a path to your door.
The other examples may have been 10x each but the Internet seems more like 1,000,000x
