
Top Dying Industries, and lessons for your startup - onik69
http://feefighters.com/blog/the-10-worst-businesses-to-start/
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runT1ME
Wow, I think this article is taking quite a leap calling shrinking industries
dying. I'm not sure anyone would argue that the typewriter industry is
anything but dying, or the pager market.

However, does anyone really think that wired telephone lines are going to
disappear from business anytime soon? Or that apparel companies aren't going
to need manufacturers?

 _Shrinking_ industries are a great place to introduce disruption, and many
times profit can be made from causing a market to shrink.

Anytime a high margin industry have an entrant willing to take lower margins,
the industry is going to shrink, but it's not bad for anyone but the
incumbents. Take a look at Redhat and MySQL, they were happy to take high
margin, hugely profitable industries and contribute to their decline, because
it _allowed them to capture a bigger chunk of a smaller market_.

It just so happened it was good for all the rest of us too.

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il
Do you have a landline phone? Do you know anyone under 50 who does? Is there
any reason to have a landline phone nowadays when you can make VoIP calls from
home for free with Google Voice? I think the writing is on the wall for that
industry.

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joe_the_user
Land-line providers are now broadband providers. But that doesn't leave them
small or unimportant. The value of wired-lines is still a lot.

That said, wireless is inherently more efficient than wired and so it seem
likely wired technology is going to go by the wayside.

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dasil003
It's certainly an interesting list, but I have to question whether this is
anything but preaching to the choir. "Don't ignore technology, innovate, bla
bla blah", this is just boilerplate silicon valley talk.

Just because an industry is on the decline doesn't mean there's no opportunity
there. Hell would you rather compete in a billion dollar market that used to
be 2 billion, or enter a nascent market where you run out of cash before it's
even big enough to sustain you? If you want to be the next Google then you'd
probably go with the latter, but remember, Google didn't get where they are
today by wanting to be the next Google. It wasn't all planned out, they did it
by taking advantage of opportunities along the way.

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fredBuddemeyer
i strongly recommend staying away from dying industries; the issue is not so
much the size of the market. an industry on the decline doesn't have new
users: people that make the purchase decision you are asking for. a smaller
yet dynamic market is made mostly of such people so it can actually have more
potential buyers.

i run an old company in fixed wire telecom, (bigredwire) and a new one in
social media (littleBiggy) and i see this every day.

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JonLim
Going to disagree about the video postproduction services - there will always
be a market for that even though editing tools are becoming cheaper and easier
to use.

Why? How many people know how to use Adobe After Effects or Apple Motion and
know how to use it well?

Not many!

Video produced by amateurs is a sure fire way to turn people away from your
business. I think the demand for this will be just fine.

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pitdesi
Agreed that there will always be a market for video postproduction (and
actually all of the other things on the list too), but it is dying (in terms
of revenues), because having a guy who knows how to use After Effects is a lot
cheaper than making special effects on film.

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JonLim
That I can see. However, there still seems to be a lot of admiration for the
guys who can pull off special effects in real life over digitally adding them
later.

As far as I can tell.

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bergie
You could also argue that a "dying industry" would be an excellent market to
enter and do things differently

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pitdesi
I agree with that statement generally.

One (sort of) case in point is American Apparel. While they are now in deep
shit (nearly going to bankruptcy but just got rescued), they were doing pretty
well for a few years as a vertically integrated apparel maker, with a factory
in downtown LA.

Hard to think of other examples.

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seanharper
I think its debatable whether american apparel did well because they were
vertically integrated / located in the US, or in spite of it.

Nucor is another example frequently cited as a company innovating in a
shrinking industry. But they have had their share of troubles as well.

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joe_the_user
This article continues my dislike for "argument through top ten lists".

The problem with long lists of X is they can include some things where the
argument is clear cut and no one disagrees, then once they get you nodding
yes, they can then include other things where the situation is more debatable.

Wired carriers and newspaper printing are indeed two industries which
technology at least promises to leave by the wayside. Arguably they've been
disrupted or are being disrupted and, whether they will or not, we could at
least imagine them shrinking to nothing at all in some number of years.

Home building, on the other hand, is merely in cyclical downturn. It hasn't
been meaningfully disrupted on the same sense of the word. It's had a rough
downturn but people will keep needing housing. Manufactured homes tend to be
one the low end, so, indeed, they've been hit hardest. But still, homes as
they are built now involve a huge rat-bag of inefficient, wasted and manual
labor. The possibility of manufacturing a better house in very-cost-efficient
fashion certainly _is_ a tremendous opportunity for some organization
(probably fairly large scale, however). I don't know what combination of
automation and design would work but unlike newspapers or wired-networks,
there is a big opportunity here.

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mikecarlucci
Maybe I'm off base, but for #10 formal clothing rentals, if people are
dressing up less often, wouldn't it make more sense to rent a suit or tux for
an event than to spend several (or more) times that amount for something you
won't wear again or could go out of fashion/no longer fit when the next
opportunity arises?

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pitdesi
More accurate is probably "less people are dressing up." Those that are
dressing up are buying. I bought a tux for less than twice the cost of a
rental

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Bitsofstardust
What about industries that were in strong decline but successfully reinvented
themselves such as fast food?

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rick888
Movie rental places are dying, but I think there is still room for niche
Netflix type sites.

