
Ask HN: Why making something people want is so hard? - paulus_magnus2
It could be that I need a new perspective, but my impression is that making &#x2F; finding something people want is really hard. Even if you forget about making money.<p>Not sure which examples to give to back my point
- let&#x27;s say you make a car and sell it cheap. Still initially no one will trust the car is worth anything. It&#x27;ll take years of making better cars than competition before reputation is established. With this in mind I tend to buy products &#x2F; services from companies on the rise that need to prove themselves rather than companies &quot;monetising their reputation&quot;. <i>cough</i> VW <i>cough</i><p>I&#x27;m currently reading &quot;Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture&quot; and it strikes me how easy it was to sell a game back then. Like there was much more demand than supply so people would buy <i>anything</i>.<p>Nowadays just about any market is covered &#x2F; commoditised by a big corporation. And it&#x27;s never the case that they are maxed out on production capacity.<p>My impression is that much more supply of everything and people already have everything they need &#x2F; want and more.<p>Can someone who witnessed the tech revolution of the last 20 years say if it was any different at any point? Was it ever obvious what people need and &quot;if you build it, they will come&quot;?
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dozzie
Look at all the _categories_ of goods you have available. You can have
virtually any furniture, clothes, jewelery, stationary or mobile electronics,
craft and hobby tools, transportation, food, books, or services of various
sorts. You can fill up your leisure with so many possible activities that it
may become very hard to find something you really enjoy, something that hits
the spot and allows you to stop searching.

And now image you have a new product or service. This product will need to
compete for _attention_ of your potential customers with everything else that
is so sexy already and what they already know. How do you get it through to
their awareness?

You can also try to make something actually useful. Something that is needed
for something, like cheaper technology for producing plastics, or to mine
titanium as efficiently as iron is now, or allows to launch medium-scale
production in a garage with $10k worth of equipment. This seems to be much
easier way than to compete with luxury distractions we have. But, of course,
you need to have an executable idea for a real need out there.

