There is limitless opportunity outside of the webtech/adtech bullshit bubble. Go create a hardware startup, it's never been easier. It's still harder than adtech bullshit was 10 years ago, but the turnkey manufacturing industry is faaaar better than all the "hardware is hard" weekly blogspam would lead you to believe.
Any hints on how to even begin looking into this? There's a plethora of content on starting SaaS projects but can't say I've ever come across any for hardware.
That's gonna depend on your skills and what you think is interesting to pursue. Generally speaking you'll want to learn how to, at a minimum, model stuff and 3d print it, and how to design PCBs. I strongly suggest FreeCAD and KiCad for those tasks respectively.
I like making hardware and SW that goes with it... I'm just not sure how you validate the market need for something like that and what hw more exactly to build. I feel there is already so much stuff...
I haven't read this elsewhere so it may be non-validated but you shouldn't imagine customers of a product as entirely captured nor cohesive. Inside of the customer pool are going to be people who are displeased with the product for sometimes disparate reasons but not enough to find a different product because this one is "good enough".
To make this example very simple, a product may produce orange widgets. It's good enough for most people but one group wishes it made a more yellow widget while another group wishes it made a more red widget. The orange widget isn't the ideal case, it's a compromise to serve the most people.
If someone came in and made a product that produces very yellow widgets and focuses on the yellow widget market, you could serve those people very well despite being having a smaller pool.
In other words, your product doesn't need to go toe-to-toe with the orange widget product that has a revenue of $1B, you only need to pick off the yellow widget people to get a revenue of, lets say, $10M and you are eating very well.
I also think the opportunity to build small but helpful gadgets is bigger than finding the perfect SaaS idea. But it’s still not exactly easy to come up with something new. Whenever I see an ingenius product I think to myself „This was obvious, why haven’t I thought of that?“, but oh well.
There is limitless opportunity outside of the webtech/adtech bullshit bubble. Go create a hardware startup, it's never been easier. It's still harder than adtech bullshit was 10 years ago, but the turnkey manufacturing industry is faaaar better than all the "hardware is hard" weekly blogspam would lead you to believe.