
Ask HN: What are the least competitive consumer and enterprise markets? - trevett
My experiment in working backwards from market to problems to solutions:<p>1. Start with listing markets that have a low degree of competition, but don&#x27;t have a mega-monopoly owning them. These will mostly be small markets.<p>2. Examine the problem space within each and see if new technology (SW &#x2F; HW) can deliver 10x improvements.<p>3. Determine whether these markets are a short enough hop away from deeper ones.<p>It&#x27;s surprisingly hard to get a &quot;map&quot; of existing markets, but am curious about those the community can readily identify.
======
quickthrower2
My experiment that I am thinking of recently is almost the opposite.

1\. Start with markets with high competition. E.g. paid alternatives to Google
forms.

2\. Get a list of 50+ products competing in the space. If < 50 go back to step
1.

3\. Google to find what people, who are on the paid tiers of those products,
complain about. This is easy as I am now Googling brand names so should get
laser targeted results (v.s. googling "problem I had creating a form" -> Stack
Overflow user who'll never pay for a form!)

4\. Interview them to dig in further. If you can't get any of these people to
even spare 5 minutes to talk, then it might be an indicator that you wont get
them to buy.

5\. Based on this, derive a hypothesis for a MVP that would solve the problem,
along with the market it serves and where to find these people.

6\. Presell to people in #4. If they say no - dig in further as to why. If
they say yes, aim for maybe $1000 monthly revenue presold, then build.

The reason for this approach is it filters for the "are people motivated
enough to spend money" which I think is the biggest risk for the ideas I come
up with. Since they are (they already use the "competitor" product"), can I
carve out a niche where I do something better for a specific group of people?
Can I reach them easily without spending crazy money on ads? And am I solving
their problem?

Caveat is this is designed as an idea generator for an Indie Hacker style
project, not a startup!

~~~
munificent
You should probably add a step:

5.5. Derive a hypothesis for why the 50 other competitors have not already
solved this problem or couldn't do so quickly once they discover your
solution.

If you don't have a good answer for this, then the odds are one of two things
will happen:

1\. You will waste a bunch of time only to discover that you were ignorant of
some deep constraint of the problem area.

2\. Your competition will re-implement your feature and crowd you out.

~~~
camhart
I wouldn't worry so much about #2 unless the market is extremely small or
you're looking to raise money or your only vision of success is a giant
company.

Most markets with existing companies serving them are big enough to support a
small indie company. And there are things you can offer as a small company
that's difficult for big company's to offer.

~~~
munificent
That's true, but personally, I would be really hesitant to get into a market
with several large dominant players without a _significant_ edge. The reality
of business in the US is constant consolidation towards a small number of
huge, anti-competitive players. I can't find the source right now, but I've
seen statistics that the total number of businesses in the US is _much_
smaller today than it was, say, 50 years ago.

So I think your expectation, assuming you are in the US, is that your business
has one of a few trajectories:

* You deliberately aim for a market with many small businesses and forces that go against consolidation. There are fewer of these over time, but anything explicitly local, has few economies of scale, or where consumers specifically target variety is a good place to look. Think restaurants, luthiers, and other "craft" businesses. Then you can have a long moderate term success while staying small. You probably won't get rich but you might like your life.

* You try to grow very rapidly to get to be a big fish before the other big fish eat you. You take a ride on the VC train and if you're lucky escape with your soul intact.

* You aim to get bought. You lose the experience of it being _your_ business but you might get rich in return.

* You get crushed or bought against your will. Short of simply fading away from lack of success, this is probably the most likely outcome.

------
thorwasdfasdf
Beware: if there are markets that appear uncompetitive, there is a damn good
reason for it. And it's never becaues no-one thought to look there. If you do
find uncompetitive markets, it'll most likely be because someone has
regulatory capture, or there is something preventing new entrants, high
barriers to entry, or the cost of user acquisition is simply too high for new
entrants.

~~~
raverbashing
Or, some businesses are just not worth it.

You can throw as much business intelligence and automation to, let's say, an
Ice Cream truck. It will still be an Ice Cream truck. Nobody is becoming a
millionaire with it.

~~~
nmfisher
> Or, some businesses are just not worth it. > You can throw as much business
> intelligence and automation to, let's say, an Ice Cream truck. It will still
> be an Ice Cream truck. Nobody is becoming a millionaire with it.

That's probably what people said about coffee and cafes prior to Starbucks.

~~~
guiriduro
Starbucks is an essentially American phenomenon. e.g., nobody in Europe ever
thought coffee shops needed to become branded chains that set a single product
quality expectation, because almost nobody who'd ever visited an
Italian/mediterranean-style cafe ever thought they lacked a quality or
sociability option to begin with. Sure, some chains exist, but the quality
delta between them and the average cafe isn't great enough to scale fast.

Only in a place where coffee is generally awful, and VC money easy, could the
concept that became Starbucks ever come into existence.

~~~
nmfisher
There's a whole lot factually wrong about your comment (Starbucks started as a
single cafe, it wasn't funded by VC, and it started in the 70s/80s when money
was far from cheap, and 1/3 of its total outlets are in Asia).

But that's all beside the point. I'm not saying an Italian would be able to
replicate Starbucks in Italy. What I'm saying is that there are countless
opportunities staring us right in the face, every day, and 99% of people see a
cafe and think "it can't scale, it's local demand only, there's no point, why
bother", the remaining 1% see Starbucks.

------
Animats
_It 's surprisingly hard to get a "map" of existing markets_

No, it's not. It might take more than a Google search.

You can extract what you want from US business census data. See
"data.census.gov". Look for NAICS codes with a small number, but greater than
3, companies, and high dollar amounts for the category.

~~~
trevett
It seems there are 19 codes: [https://www.naics.com/search-naics-codes-by-
industry/](https://www.naics.com/search-naics-codes-by-industry/). I'm
interested in more granularity e.g. where "mobile video editing software"
appears on the map, show me the market size, top companies, estimated sales,
etc.

~~~
Animats
That's just the top level of NAICS codes. For example, 441320 is tire dealers.
512191 is "Teleproduction and Other Postproduction Services"[1]

"Mobile video editing software" is a product type, not a business type. If you
want product categories, you need a different data source. Such as Amazon's,
or Google's or Alibaba's product tree. Here's Google's product hierarchy.[2]
Google category 4953 is "Software > Computer Software > Multimedia & Design
Software > Video Editing Software".

If you want such results handed to you without much work on your part, you may
have to pay a company which collects such data. NAICS or D&B or some of the
mailing list companies could make you a list.

[1] [https://www.naics.com/code-
search/?naicstrms=video](https://www.naics.com/code-search/?naicstrms=video)

[2] [https://www.google.com/basepages/producttype/taxonomy-
with-i...](https://www.google.com/basepages/producttype/taxonomy-with-ids.en-
US.txt)

~~~
trevett
Thanks for that. I think the NAICS codes could be fleshed out a little to be
more relevant and useful.

Not to beat this example to death, but there is a market for mobile video
editing applications and I have no idea of its size. Wikipedia only lists one
iOS product. I feel there would be a lot of value in providing this kind of
information easily to people. I personally don't want to engage with a market
research firm during the exploratory phase.

~~~
usmannk
I've been doing research on this exact category myself (after having
previously had some modest success on the image editing side.) You're severely
underestimating the number of competitors. Try searching the relevant app
stores instead of Wikipedia (why would you ever even check here?).

~~~
wtracy
I think parent was complaining that there's very little public information
(particularly hard numbers) about the incumbents. GP was cruising Wikipedia
for information about the apps' parent companies rather than just trying to
identify the apps.

It's easy to see how many apps are in the store. It's a lot harder to know how
much money they are grossing.

------
jrumbut
Could be labor organizing. I've had a job for years and never even been
solicited about it.

The incumbent players are ignoring massive swaths of the addressable market at
a time when, judging by my social media feed, there is renewed interest in
labor issues.

A big reason for this is their reliance on a high-touch, manual onboarding
process and slow, high overhead contract negotiation techniques. Prime for
marketing automation, SaaS tools, chatbots, etc.

Additionally, for purely historical reasons, they have segmented the market by
trade. There's no particular reason for you to follow this path, may as well
help everyone get a better deal from their employer (and a cut for yourself!).

~~~
pkkim
I don't know much about contract negotiation, but for organizing "high touch"
doesn't begin to describe it! The labor organizer's job is to convince the
worker, who likely and often rightly fears for her job if she actively and
publicly supports the union, that it's still the right thing to do. Not only
convince intellectually, but psychologically prepare the worker to stick with
the union effort in the face of a concerted effort from the employer to defeat
it. To do that the organizer needs to ask the right questions, listen
carefully, build trust, and finally push, and potentially do this repeatedly
with the same person. It is psychologically demanding and not everyone can do
it; I tried and I couldn't. A chatbot cannot convince a factory worker with
kids to feed that he needs to stick up for his coworkers who in turn will
stick up for him. All that said I think there is room in the process for
profitable automation, but it's auxiliary to the main work.

If you're interested Jane McAlevey's book Raising Expectations and Raising
Hell is a good introduction to union organizing.

------
tcmb
Check out the translation industry. It's a fairly niche market, with its own
quirks. There is a good book that gives an overview of how the industry works,
but I can't remember the title atm. It has a yellow cover and some cartoon
drawings inside... :) If you're interested I can dig a bit more and find it.

There is software for translation management, which is essentially project
management, but because of the intricacies of the business there is
specialized software for it. There are maybe 2 or 3 main competitors, all of
which do the job but are fairly awful to use. Then there are a handful of
products which come from computer-assisted translation (CAT, which is
different from machine translation), and try to capture the project management
part as well. Because their focus is on CAT, they're also not excellent in the
management aspect.

If you want to capture the whole spectrum with all the edge cases, it's going
to be a very complex product which will require a lot of user research and
take a fairly long time to build. But there might be an opportunity to go to
market earlier, with a subset of the functionality, and build from there.

~~~
nojs
If you can remember the title of the book I’d love to read it.

~~~
tcmb
It’s called ‘The General Theory of the Translation Company’ by R. Beninatto
and T. Johnson.

~~~
severine
Thanks a lot for diggin' it out! Looks really interesting, yay!

------
kirillzubovsky
When it comes to market selection, I often think back to how Ryan Petersen
came up with the idea of Flexport. He put up landing pages and some ads, and
only when he saw interest from the biggest players did he go all in. It's a
pretty darn good way to find out, even if it sounds too simple, or cheap, but
if you listen to the rest of the interview, Ryan had semi-failed enough times
beforehand to realize that simplicity was key. Maybe throw a bunch of landing
pages up and see what works?

(original audio segment: [https://smashnotes.com/p/y-combinator/e/92-ryan-
petersen/s/h...](https://smashnotes.com/p/y-combinator/e/92-ryan-
petersen/s/how-did-flexport-get-its-first-customers))

~~~
abi
That's pretty cool! Didn't know that Flexport started out like this.

Here's another example of using a landing page to validate demand, and one
where the product ended up being a very successful company:
[https://sumo.com/stories/80-20-business-idea-
validation](https://sumo.com/stories/80-20-business-idea-validation)

I recently played around with the landing page method for an idea I had and
ended up not getting much traction. That negative feedback was really useful
in helping me decide whether to actually code up the app. Wrote about here, if
anyone's interested: [https://abiraja.com/the-landing-page-
method/](https://abiraja.com/the-landing-page-method/)

~~~
system2
Good read. I think for anyone creating so many ideas and want to test, it is
safer to try landing page method. 100 ideas, 3 really gets traffic, then those
3 really work.

~~~
abi
Yeah, I think the key point is that the landing page method is great for
identifying smashing successes (high true positive rate, low false positive
rate). But ideas that fail the landing page method might still be good, just
need more investigation (high false negative rate).

------
muzani
Language and culture is usually a barrier. For example, one of my apps really
blew up because we targeted Malaysian low carb dieters. Western low carb diets
are well done and cover all kinds of things like steak and pizza alternatives.
We covered local dishes like laksa (spicy noodle soup) and rendang (a kind of
meat dish). We got 3,000 monthly active users with very little paid marketing
and 3% of them were paying customers.

This fit in with your other requirements - it would be easy to hop from low
carb recipes to say, Indian vegetarian recipes.

The 10x trick is done by looking for crappy apps with a substantial user base.
In our case, we were competing with a FB group with 200 thousand users and a
constant stream of posts that made it difficult for people to look for
recipes. Our app competitor was a HTML5 app which someone did as a technical
demo, with 50 thousand users.

~~~
ponker
90 paying users is cool but I wouldn’t say it “really blew up”

~~~
muzani
It was a health food grocery app, so basket size per user was high. It was
RM32-RM128, which by purchasing power translates to roughly $40-$168 per
paying user per month. This is also averaging it - as a diet app, we peaked
around Dec-March.

And it was more on the flow. We got 1200 users in the first 24 hours, after a
two week hack. There was definitely a market there. The goods were overpriced
because we didn't have economy of scale, but if we did get the prices down as
intended, we'd have far more regular customers.

~~~
pknerd
How did you perform market research for a country like Malaysia. Was your idea
based on some personal observations?

~~~
muzani
Pivoting. It was originally a grocery price comparison app. That was illegal
(long story). So we pivoted to a recipe app and try to sell ingredients. We
looked at other recipe apps like Cookpad and felt that what they were missing
was quality control.

We wanted a quick and dirty prototype that was a subset of the grocery market,
so that if it didn't go well, it would just be controlled damage.

I was following a low carb diet so I did a low carb diet app, solving my own
problem. There were some blogs and a crappy app that did this. The Facebook
group had too much traffic to keep track of recipes and no quality control, so
half the recipes were terrible. We released the app, expecting about 30
downloads but it was 1200 and crashed the server temporarily. We also got some
feedback that calorie count wasn't helpful, so we switched to carb count, and
were the only ones on the market to compile all the local recipes and have
carb count for them.

The business model canvas helped a lot in the process. We drafted a business
model, then identified the riskiest thing and tackled that. At first it was
the business proposition (which went from find food > eat healthy > lose
weight). Then it was revenue model (sell directly, instead of ads). Then
operations, delivery. The target market was unintended and we could well have
missed it, because low carb diets aren't part of the culture.

~~~
pknerd
Damn HN has no notification system!

Interesting story. A Pakistani who is willing to get settled in Malaysia in
coming years, I was wondering what kind of things I could make for the local
market which made me to ask the question.

------
vsskanth
I know a niche in hardware, encountered while doing R&D for an F500.

High sample rate (20 Hz min.) sensor telemetry (9 DOF IMU + GPS) over cellular
network, as a single encapsulated unit with built in antenna and a battery to
handle power interruptions.

Data needs to go a remote server and devices should be remotely manageable if
deployed as a fleet.

I searched quite a bit and eventually ended up using a bunch of Samsung Galaxy
phones in a hard case, with a datalogging app and an automation that syncs log
files to Dropbox. Devices were managed over TeamViewer.

There are some small players in this field each satisfying 70% of these
requirements and they're printing money.

All the pieces are out there. Just need someone to make a product so
enterprises can throw money at them.

~~~
trevett
I like your minimalist solution. Fleet tracking / management seems like a
commodity business with a lot of players in it. How do you differentiate and
win here?

~~~
vsskanth
Fleet management solutions are built for EDL requirements. They have event
based logging and won't log data at high sample rates and don't send it to a
server of your choice because they want you to use their subscription based
dashboard.

~~~
trevett
Curious which applications require logging at high sample rates vs. doing
event-based?

~~~
vsskanth
From my narrow experience as an R&D engineer in the auto sector:

You need to understand the duty cycle of the platform you're developing for
(ex. Tires for a vehicle). A garbage truck is going to have a different
loading cycle from an EV or a CAT morning truck. If you know the right
conditions your product will fail on durability.

Fleets are ok with collecting this data for R&D as long as you don't bother
them with extra work and give them useful analytics. Data collection devices
need to be easy to install, collect for a few weeks and remove.

You can also use this as an R&D platform to develop IoT data-enabled products
like predictive maintenance, route analytics, insurance and warranty claims
etc. ML has a lot of potential here but you need to collect data.

Eventually when you have an IoT product you can get a vendor to make an
optimized ASIC to collect and process exactly what signals you want.

There are many more applications in the auto industry for these kind of niche
products.

------
ideals
Services that sell to HOAs

This is something I've been thinking about since my HOA sent me an email a
month ago warning me that the sidewalk outside my property may be damaged and
in need of repair because if someone tripped I'd be liable for this. Of course
the email had a bunch of red and gold text.

Luckily for me they already had a concrete cutting company come by and survey
the area and provide estimates for each plot.

My bill would be about $200 to fix the sidewalk. I looked outside and it was
totally level and no edges exposed.

In really small print at the bottom of the email was information telling me it
was optional to do, but again I might be liable if anything happens.

Today I saw this person outside doing the concrete repairs. It was a guy with
a small trailer and grinding down the sidewalk with an angle grinder and a
vacuum to suck up the dust.

This basic concrete cutting job is pulling money in if he can go around and
tell all the HOAs about the urgent need to fix sidewalks and HOAs pass that
along to all the residents.

How many people paid the $200 "to be on the safe side"?

Now you repeat for all the other services you can think about for home
maintenance and repair and contact HOAs with estimates they can pass along.

~~~
gruez
>because if someone tripped I'd be liable for this

isn't the sidewalk the city's responsibility? Also, wouldn't your homeowner's
insurance cover it?

>In really small print at the bottom of the email was information telling me
it was optional to do, but again I might be liable if anything happens.

Honestly the arrangement seems rent-seeking(ish) to me. At the very least it
leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They're not providing any _real_ value, just
scaring people into paying with an (arguably) misleading letter.

~~~
ta1234567890
> They're not providing any real value, just scaring people into paying

Unfortunately there are plenty of business built exactly like that.

One anecdote: there was a group of lawyers that would hire people in
wheelchairs to go into stores (e.g. local Verizon dealer) and ask to use the
restroom, then once inside the restroom measure everything and take notes.
Apparently businesses are not required to make their restrooms available to
the public, but if they do, they need to be up to code. So these guys would
target chains of businesses that normally didn't allow public into their
restrooms, hence the restrooms were usually not up to code. After gathering
enough data they would then sue the companies and offer to settle for an
amount very close to what it would cost the company to deal with the case in
court.

~~~
throwaway936482
Or you could see it as them using the Ada for it's exact intended purpose, to
force businesses not to exclude disabled customers by imposing an actual cost
on them that is potentially greater than the cost of complying with the act.
Sounds good to me!

~~~
imtringued
I don't see how this is good. Some businesses allow their customers to use
their private bathroom on a case by case basis. Now they will just stop doing
that so everyone suffers equally.

~~~
throwaway936482
Their bathrooms should be accessible for their employees as well, even if
they're not usable by customers, because disabled people should be able to
work to.

------
claudiulodro
The least competitive markets are most likely local small-businesses with
regional restrictions. By this I mean places that where you need to physically
go (e.g. dry cleaner) or where someone needs to physically come to you (e.g.
electrician). Because you're only competing with people in a specific region,
these are going to be much less competitive than industries where you compete
with the whole world (e.g. software).

This doesn't necessarily help you come up with new software, but it is
something I've spent a lot of time thinking about since I'm also trying to
start a business.

~~~
pklausler
I would pay handsomely for a service that would find and dispatch a qualified
tradesperson (electrician, residential HVAC, plumbing, &c.) that would show up
when promised and get the job done. And would guarantee the work, pull
permits, and get me a lien waiver afterwards. I really hate the time it takes
to wade through online reviews, play phone tag, and deal with flakes and no-
shows when there's something that needs to be done around the house.

~~~
prawn
For those tradespeople, running a small business can be seriously time
consuming. I try to support lone tradies or very small business people, but
it's almost always easier finding slightly larger ones that have enough staff
that there is someone handling quotes and delegating tradespeople.

I'd suggest building a backoffice for tradies that automates as much as
possible. Payments, chasing payments, reminding them of people waiting for
quotes, etc. A CRM app that all their incoming enquiries go directly to, etc.
Otherwise they have quote requests coming into their phone messages or emails
and getting lost along with everything else. I run a small business and have
200-500+ unread emails at almost any time. If something slips off the first
screen of G-Suite, it is much harder to remember it.

~~~
claudiulodro
ServiceTitan[1] is a big company that does exactly this, but there's probably
space for more than one player.

[1] [https://www.servicetitan.com/](https://www.servicetitan.com/)

------
jmchuster
So usually what happens is that an individual is an expert in their under-
served area, sees the opportunity, and then puts in the effort to build a
business to serve that opportunity. The point being that you won't get people
who know of lots of opportunities, but rather many individuals who each know
of their own opportunity. And you most likely won't find such domain experts
on HN.

It might be worth looking for evidence of attempts at building such
businesses, since often such domain expertise doesn't pair with business-
building expertise. So if you're trying to build such a map, then maybe look
at all the businesses (including all the failed ones) that served each market.

------
bobosha
Related: I highly recommend The Blue Ocean Strategy[1]. I suspect what you are
looking for is the Blue Ocean market space, not necessarily the "least
competitive". As others have pointed out, if a sector lacks multiple entrants,
it is almost always with very good reason.

[1] [https://learn.blueoceanstrategy.com](https://learn.blueoceanstrategy.com)

------
mamcx
You can _safely_ bet than any below the highest tech-level industries (so
anything not called Apple, MS, ....) are under-served.

I work in the small-bussines and before in government. have done some stuff
for some of the biggest companies in my country (Colombia).

To say ALL of them are like 20-10 years behind is not say enough.

Today, I'm integrating with cobol and other stuff that only have text-based
files as interface.

A problem is that not many investment are in this long tail, so when talking
about solutions for this market is possible to NOT get excitement for it.

I'm building on the side a relational language that eventually could be an
Access+Excel tool, but everyone is interesting in the markets that reach
billons :).

------
rsweeney21
I like to look at industries that customers hate. Tech support, cable,
wireless, health insurance,etc.

I picked tech recruiting for my most recent startup. :)

We've bootstrapped to over $2M in revenue in 18 months. People seem to like
the service much better than traditional recruiting.

(Shameless plug: [https://www.facet.net](https://www.facet.net))

~~~
trevett
That's awesome, congrats. I can't tell what your secret sauce is from your
website. I'd love to ask you how you marketed this service if you want to
shoot me an email (see profile).

------
pieno
I’m not sure whether the competitiveness of the market is very relevant for
your success in finding a profitable innovation. Profitable innovation is
hard, in any market.

There may be an expectation that there are higher profit margins in non-
competitive markets, so you may have an advantage there that any innovation
will allow you to capture more excess profits as it will take longer for those
excess products to be eaten by increased competition you triggered.

On the other hand, there’s an expectation that the incumbent(s) in a non-
competitive market has a lot of funds at its disposal (due to years of
capturing producers excess profits in a non-competitive market) to hamper
innovation.

To me, this illustrates that whether the market is competitive or not is not
very relevant. The question is whether you are able to outcompete the market
by reducing costs and/or improving your offering compared to your market,
whether that’s a single monopolist or 1,000 highly competitive companies.

------
tedmcory77
Are you familiar with Porters five forces? and the sixth, which is regulatory
environment?

If you're not, it's worth it's weight in gold when evaluating markets and
looking at how do build your business model.

------
jariel
A lot of good comments here.

A different way to approach this problem, is to consider culture: 'people like
us, are attracted to certain things'.

Those fields are overwhelmed.

So, where are the 'completely unsexy' areas?

1) Human Waste. Port-o-potties are a huge business, and it's a nasty problem,
pun intended.

2) Agriculture. Farms are not hip.

3) A lot of goods and services targeting low-income people who are extremely
price sensitive and don't care about how cool things look.

4) Anything to do with a business that is mundane: cleaning, forensic
accounting, physical security, garbage, etc..

Literally walk down the street and look at what people do, it's funny how you
can get an instinct for how very 'specific' YC pattern types are, and how
we're a little bit out of touch.

~~~
trevett
I agree, we may have reached peak level of Seth Godin-approved consumer
startups.

Re: 1, it does bother me producing all that plastic when a cardboard structure
with sterile, swappable lining might do just as well in non-windy areas.

------
dzonga
you need to work backwards. ask yourself: are you trying to be vc funded or
bootstrap. that alone will determine what kind of clients or markets you can
serve. #1 ask yourself is the market growing or dying - I made a mistake once
of making software for laundromats i.e dying market n run by old people.
depending on which path you chose bootstrap or vc 1% customers of your total
market can be enough to sustain yourself. on the bootstrapped level. if vc,
better chop up vc money n live large

------
adrr
Anything relating to regulated banking. The challenger banks all have a
chartered bank partner under the hood.

Licensed Banking: a there hasn’t been a new chartered banks in a decade

Also Clearing Brokerage. Credit Bureaus. US Core banking software, KYC
providers(Eg:lexis nexus), bill pay providers

~~~
toufique
Also, The Fed

------
PeterCorless
To solve for this one would need to create metrics around measuring markets
and opportunities. I suggest the following three axes:

X. Market size (actual values, divisible into competitors) Y. Market valence
(positive/negative consumer/user/customer/investor perceptions of each of the
competitors; e.g., some sort of objectified, normalized
product/service/company rating) Z. Market momentum (vectors of
growth/shrinking/stagnation of the market overall, and each of the competitors
within it, broken into actual past vs future projected)

Many times a market may not grow not because the market "isn't there," but
because all of the existing offerings frankly stink. Imagine movies. If you
have 12 terrible science fiction movies in a row, does that mean there's no
market for science fiction movies, or does that mean someone finally needs to
make a _good_ science fiction movie?

You might also have to define more granular domains. Maybe the market might be
for a geographic region, or a vertical or horizontal market sector.

------
austincheney
1\. For a low competition market I am looking at browser automation of user
interaction. I recently created an original solution for a niche set of
problems that incidentally solves many other more common problems.

2\. The cool thing about this space is that it isn’t new technology that
delivers 10x improvements. The opposite actually. 10x improvements are found
by doing the least possible effort in a tiny library, scaling to support a
wider problem space, and doing it substantial better than large products
present in the marketplace.

The few competitors are easy to search but most of the commercial products are
so expensive that it’s hard to really gauge the precise performance
capabilities are the smaller players without a large financial investment.

3\. I am just now learning about second order effects from this thing as I
extend it to support execution across networks/VMs. There are all manner of
second order surprises that emerge from better software automation.

------
disambiguation
anecdotal, but my roommate is a first year lawyer. A lot of his job is taking
old legal docs and updating them for new deals. This is a lot of tedious
search and replace and formatting in hard-to-edit PDFs.

A sample scenario is one of his senior colleagues takes a PDF and writes in
some comments -- almost like a teacher grading an essay with a red pen, change
this x to y, etc. This goes to my friend, who reviews, edits, and returns the
draft by email. And there will be a lot of back and forth, plus other people
making edits in real time.

watching this i can't help but notice how remarkably similar it is to
programming, minus all the convenience of programming tools.

i don't know what the product or barriers are here, but these people could
easily 10x if they knew about version control and markup languages.

~~~
codingdave
I work in this niche. I actually work a niche within this niche, and have
implemented solutions. We do have a couple competitors. But most new players
in this arena come in with exactly that statement - "oh, this is like
programming, lets bring in markdown and git and solve all the things!" Then
they realize that the level of detail and the expectations of legal document
authors are far higher than they ever expected. Markdown doesn't cut it. HTML
doesn't cut it. CKEditor and tinyMCE don't cut it. We spend a huge amount of
effort re-writing plugins for those editors to meet the actual expectations,
and defining new data formats for all the citations and interlinking of legal
documents.

Not that there isn't room for competition - there is. But the barriers are not
what people expect. And the easy answers that coders tend to see aren't the
real problems.

~~~
mrrobotchicken
How I love this comment. I do socials for CKEditor and read almost everything
there is to read for WYSIWYG rich text editing, collaborating.(a little late
this time)Feedback, frustrations, feature requests. I'm sad to read CKEditor
doesn't cut it because I'm able to see in first hand how much effort goes into
it. But I'm not surprised because I still have "I would have never guessed"
moments about all the ways people use the editors myself. There is ALWAYS room
for improvement when it comes to writing on web and feedback from users like
you are crucial :)

------
atarian
Here's a list you might be interested in:

\- home services: lawn mowing, pest control, firewood delivery

\- vehicle services: mobile oil change, mobile tire sales, locksmith

\- event/seasonal services: catering, event management, tent rentals

\- entertainment: bike tours, party rentals, hunting guides

\- personal care: mobile haircuts, mobile makeup, mobile massages

\- training/coaching/consulting: pet training, college application consulting,
credit repair consulting

\- trades/construction: electrical, plumbing, carpenting

\- business services: videography, bookkeeping, junk removal

\- real estate transactions: moving services, realtor, vacation rental
management

Source: [https://sweatystartup.com/businesses-i-
love/](https://sweatystartup.com/businesses-i-love/)

~~~
fock
*source: jobs where you are paid the minimum wage, but maybe you can cut that down a little by building a rent-seeking company.

the only things which might remotely be well paid (trades/construction)
generally have some relatively high hurdles in most countries.

~~~
atarian
>*source: jobs where you are paid the minimum wage, but maybe you can cut that
down a little by building a rent-seeking company.

You're assuming that people in these jobs get paid minimum wage and that the
only way to be profitable is to undercut their wages. By offering better
service, you can raise your rates and pay your employees better. But something
tells me you knew that already and you're just saying toxic things to
discourage people from trying.

~~~
fock
well, except for the mentioned trades, they are all lifestyle businesses and
luxury things. With 80% of the population not being able to afford this
regularly (and being super price concious) and a large portion of the
remaining 20% being chronic sociopaths you have to be very lucky to find
someone who pays you well and treats you like a human.

------
kraig911
Commercial and military aviation lol. Trust me it's by design. And you don't
want to get into this market.

------
bingobongo1
You should read this book:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

You should look for markets where a reconfiguration of leading technology
could serve a new market that existing leaders in the space are unable to
service due to structural necessities in their own established business
models.

Trying to compete against incumbents by improving what they are already making
progress on (sustaining innovations) is nearly impossible because they've set
themselves up to be leaders in incremental innovation already.

Disruptive markets are so because they emerge at profit margins and market
sizes much too small for large existing organizations to justify servicing,
and also the new products do not meet the requirements of the established
customer-base. Eventually, there is a chance that the disruptive technology
will intersect with mainstream customer requirements and this is where
customers begin to see the 10x benefits you're looking into, much further down
the road.

------
skmurphy
The least competitive markets don't exist yet, the next least are tiny. These
attract the smallest and least well funded competition.

------
eaandkw
Honestly, even if I knew of a bunch of potential markets I'm not sure I would
won't you to know. Your motivation isn't that you care about a particular
market or problem. It seems your just looking for the most efficient way to
10x your profit. Dispite knowing much about the people/ product/ market you
may serve.

I've lost count of the things that I have used in the past that I have stopped
using because the product sucks now and is of lower quality or they have
blessed me with a subscription model that only cost $5 or $10 a month. Instead
of sucking it up and paying for something once I have to die by a thousand
cuts and pay for something the rest of my life if I want to use it. Sure it's
great for the profits of that company but not for me.

So maybe that's the underserved market. A product that respects privacy and
leaves you the heck alone.

------
whalesalad
> It's surprisingly hard to get a "map" of existing markets, but am curious
> about those the community can readily identify.

Startup idea. Automate this analysis and sell the aggregate. No one wants to
do this work, but if you had a trustworthy source to exhaust all info for a
niche or corner of the market, that would be cool.

~~~
mNovak
Isn't this what all those "market intelligence" firms sell? Point is only
established companies want to pay for it.

~~~
trevett
I've met startup founders who pay for this data to help in writing their go-
to-market strategy for series A.

I really wonder how much friction there is in using a market research firm and
if that's a big deterrent to a lot of potential customers.

~~~
whalesalad
These firms have to guard their data. It’s all they have. So yeah they put up
big walls and add lots of hurdles (calls, agreements, phases, etc) to increase
the perceived value of what they are selling you.

If this data was more accessible, it would definitely be a game changer.

Finding it and presenting it and making it explorable is the really hard part.

------
keiferski
It has been my (unfortunately frequent) experience that funeral homes are
almost universally owned by individual families.

~~~
listenallyall
It's actually not true, but the real owner, Service Corp International, wants
you to think so.

> SCI then retains the funeral home's original name, often along with former
> owners who are kept on as management. A typical funeral home that is owned
> by SCI will not contain advertisements or logos for SCI

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Corporation_Internatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Corporation_International)

~~~
keiferski
Interesting to know. Thanks for the link.

Edit: actually that doesn’t seem to be correct.

 _Eighty-nine percent of funeral homes in the U.S. are owned by individuals,
families, or closely held private corporations. The remaining 11 percent are
owned by corporations whose stock is publicly traded._

From Wikipedia:

 _In the 1960s, a push for large companies acquiring smaller funeral homes and
cemeteries occurred.[18] Although there has been a consistent push for
consolidation, the majority of the industry still consists of small, family-
owned businesses.[18] Experts and analysts of the industry have estimated that
the top six funeral operators control 25 to 30% of all funeral services in
North America, with the top four owning between 15 and 20% of all funeral
homes._

~~~
listenallyall
My bad. I thought they owned more than half of the whole market.

------
rsecora
Encrypted Messaging / File transmission / IOT control.

Current messaging solutions have different issues.

1\. Not encrypted.

2\. Transmission is encrypted but they are centralized, the message is open in
the server.

3\. End to end encryption but susceptible to block because some
signaling/presence is towards a shard of central servers.

4\. The infrastructure relays on well know properties of IP/TCP (proxies,
ports...).

5\. the packet has some well know properties (checksums, structure...) that
allows to be identified and blocked.

5\. Authentication and peer identity discovery.

There was a time (early 2000s) where Skype was a headache for system
administrators, because it was able to pass any firewall and the conversations
were able to pass. That is missed in the current world.

None of the current solutions, telegram, line, whatsapp, skype, email... can
pass the previous checklist.

------
missedthecue
Utilities have a very low level of competition, but that's because they are
granted an exclusive charter by the government. Private industry still
competes in various roundabout ways, such as solar panel installation, and
batteries that can game peak/of-peak times.

------
apapli
A market with no competition is a monopoly. They are characterised by
extremely high barriers to entry.

You are better off finding something you are passionate about in a competitive
market, then working out how you will differentiate and market it with the
budgets you have to work with.

------
this2shallPass
Great strategy - you are saving yourself a lot of time with this approach.

What's the value of a good "map" of an existing market? What are you willing
to pay for one?

~~~
joshuamarksmith
I feel that maps of existing least competitive markets are low in competition.

------
lukaszkups
I don't have any experience or insights of it, but the very first thing that
came up to my mind is: frame glasses.

I've heard multiple times already that price margins are huge at that one, and
nobody are determined enough to offer lower prices for them.

But that's only what I've heard from here and there, I'm not into that topic
"that much" to confirm that - OP asked for some suggestions, so I gave one ;)

------
Keyframe
Film cameras. Dominated by ARRI, a 100 year-old company whose worth is ~250m.
There were disruptions (red, sony, etc.), but they regained dominance rather
quickly (one semi-metric is oscar nominees which cameras are used, as well as
top 500 grossing films over a year). Similar stuff in the same industry with
services and lenses with Panavision (rental only) and dollies (Chapman
Leonard, also rental only).

~~~
jiggawatts
Or even digital imaging, which is a new technology forced onto an otherwise
very conservative industry.

As an example, think of TSMC's upcoming 3nm process. It has a density of 300
million transistors per square millimetre. A Canon 5DS R has a 50 MPix
resolution, which works out to about 60K photosites per square millimetre.
That's a "budget" of 5,000 transistors per photosite!

That's more than enough to do "digital sensing". That is: accumulating photons
in a digital counter instead of using an analog capacitor, allowing unlimited
dynamic range. There would be no such thing as sensor saturation, allowing
unlimited "electronic ND filter" effects without the colors being distorted
even in a long time-lapse. It would allow "steering" of the data to nearby
accumulators through an on-chip network at megahertz rates, providing near-
perfect digital shake reduction without having to physically move the chip.
Shake reduction could track moving objects and avoid blur even for very long
hand-held exposures with cars or people in the scene, the same as what the
Google Pixel does, but at a far higher quality. The motion vectors could be
fed into a video compression stage, improving picture quality to _above_ what
the compressors can normally achieve by "guessing" the motion from 24fps still
frames.

Etc, etc...

~~~
tarlinian
What does this mean...you still need some sort of analog capacitor to collect
photons and convert them to electrons.

~~~
jiggawatts
So instead of an ADC converting an analogue charge level to a 14-bit or 16-bit
signal from a "big" capacitor, you instead have a tiny capacitor (or none at
all) and collect individual 1-bit signals and accumulate them digitally.
Photon counting, in essence.

~~~
fock
so what kind of collecting device do you propose then?

------
flaque
My uninformed guess is legal "engineering", such as tariff engineering.
Discovering the cheapest way to manufacture goods / run your business given
the most up to date legal landscape. To some respects, privacy companies that
help you navigate GDPR/CPA are in this category, but there's plenty of space
here (immigration, copyright, zoning, etc).

~~~
wombatpm
This appears to be the IKEA practice, they less of a retailer and more of an
global tax avoidance scheme

------
maxk42
Dog-walking. My roommate used to make six figures by setting up standing dog
walking appointments for affluent clients. She only worked six hours a day.
Note that this was before the days of Rover which probably dominates the
market in large cities, but I suspect suburbs and rural areas still need help.

~~~
ryanchants
I think there is definitely a place to compete against incumbent gig work
companies with local alternatives. In the dog walking example, some people are
willing to pay a premium to get the same person every time. Or, at my local
dog park, a person brings a bunch of dogs and let's them play in the park for
an hour instead of walking them.

I definitely believe this could be the path to carving out small lifestyle
businesses.

~~~
prawn
Might be an opportunity there. Find repeat customers. Find dogs that play well
together and aren't hard work. Specialise in very particular areas around
parks that suit the operation. Decline dogs that make the process too
difficult.

Letterbox drop around existing clients and parks to find more close by. Offer
volume discounts for referring neighbouring dogs.

Take said dogs to park and let them run around while you operate your other
businesses from your phone.

~~~
FartyMcFarter
> Take said dogs to park and let them run around while you operate your other
> businesses from your phone.

This doesn't sound like responsible dog handling.

~~~
prawn
No, that last bit was a joke. Working from your phone while your charges are
playing is more what most parents do!

------
Spooky23
Look for companies that have niche solutions for legacy platforms that aren’t
going anywhere like insurance systems, DMVs, social services etc.

Sometimes you can buy some little company that does something minor like
format print output for some ancient mainframe and the extract more money or
find complimentary sales.

------
landemva
Medical imaging like MRI. Put it in a truck trailer and tour the underserved
communities.

Unfortunately, States have medical device approval hurdles which often
explicitly consider competition, and prohibit the economic competition.

~~~
mNovak
MRIs draw a boatload of power to keep liquid helium liquid, even when "off"..
just account for a pretty big generator in that truck, and make very sure you
don't get stranded without heavy power overnight.

[1]
[https://www.cocir.org/fileadmin/6_Initiatives_SRI/Measuremen...](https://www.cocir.org/fileadmin/6_Initiatives_SRI/Measurement/COCIR_SRI_-
_MRI_measurement_of_energy_consumption_2012.pdf)

------
slantaclaus
Take a look at Costar (Commercial Real Estate Data / GIS Demographics)

------
mNovak
For many regional and regulatory burdened fields (e.g. ISPs), be the "Stripe
Atlas" making it easier for others to compete.

------
nosmokewhereiam
I would argue cannabis is not competitive, other than getting a license. All
you have to do is produce and test a product and it is usually sold. The
players not making it in production usually cannot produce or have problems
during production (low bag appeal, bugs, genetics, employees, quality of cure,
etc). Sure, it costs a million in business licensing and fees, but if you can
competently do it, you will succeed and your competition can't do much
[legally] to stop you.

------
m463
I think there is a market for privacy.

------
kyawzazaw
I think GIS falls into this.

~~~
nknealk
Second GIS. ESRI is ripe for disruption.

~~~
trevett
ArcGIS has a formidable feature-set to clone and users will want them all. I
believe that's their moat?

~~~
lopmotr
While I don't know about GIS specifically, I work in a similar field where the
market leaders have an enormous feature set accumulated over many decades -
some from the 1960's and never stopped growing. But I squeezed in with the
main basic features first then as I got customers, added what they wanted and
continually grew it. My advantages are price and ease of use. Users didn't
need to go on a training course without all those features to learn. Many of
the features of the big boys are so niche that most customers never need them,
or are obsolete but retained for legacy, or are just not really essential.

~~~
trevett
Can I take a look at your product? I would be curious what a minimal ArcGIS
would look like and how long it would take to build. GIS is super edge-casey,
I think.

~~~
lopmotr
No sorry. I've created too embarrassing a trail of HN comments to want to link
this identity to my livelihood. But it's not actually GIS, just a similar sort
of product. It might be that an equally minimal GIS really too feature-poor to
be any use at all.

------
m3kw9
Got create your own, sometimes there is a category of problem that can be
solved you just need to find it, that one will be least competitive

------
JTbane
ISPs.

~~~
google234123
Google already tried and sort of failed/

------
faangFar
Medical care.

You want medicine, you need to pay someone who's part of the Physician cartel,
a pharmacy, a pharmacist, and whoever has the patent.

With computers and science you often need 0 of these except the manufacturer
of the drug.

~~~
wtracy
At least one person tried this and found it to be a very hard sell:
[https://tjcx.me/posts/i-wasted-40k-on-a-fantastic-startup-
id...](https://tjcx.me/posts/i-wasted-40k-on-a-fantastic-startup-idea/)

