
Ask HN: What are some examples of 'sell shovels in a gold rush'? - JunaidBhai
In continuation of the title, what would you foresee in 2019 as the moments of &#x27;selling shovels in a gold rush&#x27;.
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thiago_fm
Many of the big web services companies that develop software use such as AWS,
Mailchimp, Sendgrid et al work around this idea. A lot of people decided to
build startups. Those started first servicing a handful of startups and were
able to grow and sell to Fortune 100 companies.

In the Blockchain hype era for example building KYC tools, social media
marketing consulting for Crypto or coinmarketcap and so on, as others have
suggested would have worked well.

You will generally want to provide a service that people would pay for in
order to build their "great scheme masterplan", meanwhile others will try to
do as well and eat their market, becoming your customers as well. While they
race to the bottom in pricing and become unicorns, you take their money and
grow your business silently.

Instead of making a brewing company in a city where there is a lot of hype,
consider owning stocks of the local water/wheat etc provider, because the beer
hype will drive up prices of other things as when people compete, they take
investment and try to grow fast in the promise of huge returns, meanwhile you
sell those to everyone that bought the hype with less investment and if there
is a champion on this battle, you can sell as well your business to the
winner. Looks like a decent strategy if you ask me.

For now, to be honest, we are more like heading to recession so I would rather
look into servicing people in debt or looking for ways to save money, avoid
losing too much in the crisis and so on. More like selling wipers to the
people who are crying in a time of crisis than shovels in a gold rush.

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rchaud
Selling video/ebook courses on any of the following "get ___ quick" fads:

\- Crypto trading

\- Keto/Intermittent Fasting

\- Dropshipping on Amazon/Shopify

\- "Booty guides", namely Word docs converted to PDF w/ fitness routines and
nutritional information sold by influencers/fitness models

\- Data Science/ML/AI ("skills of the future")

\- Learn to code-style courses ("Become a Web Developer 2019 Ultimate Package"
and the like)

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rpeden
Selling React and AI courses on Udemy.

And that's not a knock against the courses. Stephen Grider, for example, sells
some very excellent shovels.

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vidro3
Grider's react course is probably the best $12 i've ever spent

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archi42
Look at kickstarter for hugely overfunded projects. I think of the typical "If
we get 50,000 US$ we build you a 3D printer for 400 US$". And then, some time
later: "whoops, we burned through the 10,000,000US$ we made on KickStarter and
can't deliver".

(btw, a little bit OT: I always wonder why people don't cap their projects to
avoid scaling from a few 100 units (or whatever is managable by packaging the
stuff at home for a week or two) to the 10,000s (for which you'll want some
more advanced logistics); I can always run a second campaign after I delivered
a great, first iteration of the product...)

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wrestlerman
To answer your question, I guess anything that applies to a market where there
is a big rise of newcomers. Like new programmers and coding bootcamps.

If I only knew, I wouldn't tell you. I think what makes sense is to check out
what thing was already growing in 2018 and will still be growing in 2019, but
entry is relatively easy. Also if there is a possibility that this thing is
gonna be talked about a lot in upcoming months, you've found yourself a market
that you can sell your shovels to. Now, quick, find out what people may need
and make it before someone else will and you got yourself a shovel.

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cimmanom
Gold rush: crate subscriptions. Shovel seller: cratejoy.

Gold rush: phone apps. Shovel sellers: AppAnnie, Braze, etc.

Basically, finding a trend people are chasing in hopes of making money, and
selling them tooling to facilitate their business - in such a way that you
make money whether they succeed or fail.

If you’re looking for the next digital gold rush to sell shovels for, machine
learning and IoT don’t seem to have any clear market leaders for tooling yet.

If you can predict what comes next after that, there may be even better ways
to take advantage of that than selling shovels.

~~~
yesenadam
I'd buy a program RushPredictor that could predict the next digital gold rush.
But I guess everyone would want that, so that would be the rush. So then I'd
need MetaShovel..etc

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cstross
In 1996-2003: running a payment service provider for dot-coms who wanted to
actually do B2C sales on the internet. Rewind to 1996 and Paypal and similar
didn't exist, getting permission to do cardholder-not-present transactions was
a black art, and most companies used EPOS terminals talking to Visa/Mastercard
or a local franchisee (depends on the country) via modem over POTS, with about
10-30 second latency to make an authorisation check (and only one auth check
per phone call).

In 2019: look for something that disintermediates supply and demand (or, much
rarer and harder, something wholly new that nobody can supply yet and which
has vast potential demand).

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pratchett
Selling co-working spaces during startup bubbles.

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godot
Only slightly less mainstream than the "crypto" answer everyone has, is the
whole "bots" revolution that was supposed to happen in 2016, then 2017, then
2018; and the related FB Messenger and Slack bots store.

There had been pretty much no killer apps on FB Messenger or Slack (yes there
are a few profitable ones and some businesses built on them, but nothing like
the mobile app stores from back in the days). If you were in the "bots
communities" (on various social networks) like I was, you'd see that most
entrepreneurs simply try to profit off of the rush by building "easily build a
bot" services. (e.g. the Chatfuels of the world) I think it's an example where
more people try to sell shovels than actually mine for gold.

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scawf
In 2017/2018: selling GPU and ASIC

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mimixco
Shipping companies make so much money "selling shovels" that Amazon has
decided to become their own cargo airline.

The hottest example lately is cloud hosting providers who don't have to invent
software (which is hard) but simply stick on a server (which is relatively
easy).

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rafiki6
Create a data science focused product and sell it. Let people "dig" for their
data, as there's supposedly value in it. Create ASICs for Crypto currency
mining. That's probably the most directly analogous.

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alexgmcm
Data Science/ML/AI courses that have little or no recognition in industry.

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Blackstone4
Infrastructure providers for

\- data proliferation -> data centers (both hardware and software) -> Dell
Technologies/VMWare

\- 5G roll-out -> Skyworks

Trends exist for years....

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IpV8
Anything data related. People have lots of data, and panic as soon as that
data gets big enough to crash excel.

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dyeje
Crypto mining equipment.

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justaguyhere
coinmarketcap - this site is freaking HUGE and printing money for its owners.
There are much better alternatives today, but these guys were the first and
they made a lot of money

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joshmn
Commercial auto insurance brokers (Uber/Lyft etc.)

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momentmaker
API node service for decentralized oracles :)

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masonic
Early Bitcoin mining.

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0-_-0
You mean early Bitcoin mining ASICs

