For software people, the missing link is knowledge of a domain. Not domain expertise, the rare part is merely knowing that domains even exist to be searched for $20 bills.
The article mentions actuarial software for funeral homes. In retrospect, of course that's a thing, but asked to name low-hanging domains for lifestyle software businesses, few of us would ever arrive at that answer, let alone in the first 500 guesses. And is it sexy enough that we'd stake our livelihood on it?
People in these small niches can't easily tell the difference between things that are too hard to be worth the money vs things that are solved by a for loop in an afternoon, and they don't talk about their work in a way that makes it obvious that there's gold in the hills.
This is one reason that user research is an entire field that gets paid almost like engineering: framing the problem can be just as hard as the problem itself.
The article mentions actuarial software for funeral homes. In retrospect, of course that's a thing, but asked to name low-hanging domains for lifestyle software businesses, few of us would ever arrive at that answer, let alone in the first 500 guesses. And is it sexy enough that we'd stake our livelihood on it?
I'm reminded of this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1425/
People in these small niches can't easily tell the difference between things that are too hard to be worth the money vs things that are solved by a for loop in an afternoon, and they don't talk about their work in a way that makes it obvious that there's gold in the hills.
This is one reason that user research is an entire field that gets paid almost like engineering: framing the problem can be just as hard as the problem itself.