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Comment by b20000 | Hacker News Reader

b20000

I applaud your success. To me it seems that by putting distribution first, or focusing on problems to solve, that you typically end up with markets or problems you are personally not really excited about. I've done this exercise many times. I can either work on something I think is cool and there is a niche market for, but does not really "solve" a problem but addresses a "want", or I can work on something I have zero interest in but for which there probably is a market and clear distribution model. If I like adventure games, and want to make one, those don't solve a problem, and it's a niche market with a lot of competition (gaming in general). Or I can work on some online tax prep software for expats. Niche market, addresses a problem, zero personal interest, probably a big market.

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Thank you!

There are some people for whom growing a business is the exciting part. They can get excited about tax prep software if they see the opportunity.

I'm more like you (not one of those people). If I don't care about the problem, and (maybe more importantly) the users I'm solving it for, I won't solve it well.

Another point - not everything has to be a business - you can always work your day job and build adventure games on nights and weekends purely for fun.

Sometimes the best businesses come out of hobby projects. If not, whatever - it's fun and fulfilling.

you get to choose what to validate. So you can figure out which of the ideas that are acceptable to work on is worth it.

I think most people want to run a business around something they really care about or are excited about, so when you have to run one around something you have zero interest in then I don't see the advantage anymore compared to taking a day job at some company.

You really hit the nail here! I have written about this (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-myth-of-interesting-bo...) and I am still struggling to break from this. If the problem is interesting, it is probably cutting-edge in some way, ergo it is hard to solve, hard to bootstrap.

The best way imo to break this, is to build a bunch of small things that individually work but collectively point to and solve a more difficult problem. Kaleido.ai is a good example of this, they have created remove.bg and unscreen as individual products but are building something full-fledged.

I'm doing the same with CAD tools for Architects.

I started building https://cadcheck.xyz which brings me slightly closer to a larger solution that would be nearly impossible to build without VC funding.

> build a bunch of small things that individually work but collectively point to and solve a more difficult problem.

Not sure if this fits your description, but the first thing that comes to mind are the tidyverse packages

> Niche market, [...] , probably a big market

Which one is it then?

A niche of a giant can still be considered “big”.

Maybe a weird example: most fursuit builders also take mascot commissions from non-furries. They target a small niche, but also a big market.

I think niche market / big market is always subjective and very poorly defined in general leading to confusion. When chatting with a VC, "niche" probably means "not worth investing into, too small" in their simplified language even though you could mean simply that it's a subsection of some huge industry which is in itself huge. Like first person shooters in the game industry.

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