This is so true. Also, if you can solve a problem for one such customer in a reasonably sized niche you can earn recurring revenue by selling the same solution over and over again. And reasonably sized is probably much smaller than most people imagine.
Absolutely. Almost any small business will pay $1-200/month (often more!) for anything that saves or makes them $500-2000/month in money. The key is being able to communicate and help them find and define the problem that can do this.
Walking into any small business and saying "If I could save or make you anywhere between $500 and $2000 a month, would you be interested?" without a problem identified to solve finds more opportunities than anyone can imagine.
The #1 cost in any business is labour, if you save people time, and create a business case of how many hours literally are saved per week, and how many dollars are printed.
Learning to add and create value, however is at the root of not being able to make money, and understanding one's own value, genuinely and bringing that to a conversation is something that's always worth working on.
I think we focus on tech and consumers startup because of sample bias. We ourselves are techies; journalists at large are general consumers and so over-report things they are familiar with.
But most of the flows of money in the world are actually between businesses as they progressively transform products en route to the final consumer. And businesses are, in some ways, much easier to sell to.
Very few thoughts or ideas are ultimately original :)
One thing that struck me from what you said is that its up to techs to learn to relate to the rest of the world trying to make their lives easier with tech, and for the most part, are ending up working for technology, instead of technology working for them.
Oh yes. Every non-tech job I've ever had is riddled with inconvenience, drudgery, pointless paperwork. The information revolution has barely even begun.
The best part of my current contracting work is that while it isn't HN-glamorous, I save real people I talk to real hours of horrible tedium by automating away busywork. It also pays pretty well.
You definitely can sell solutions around saving costs, but you can also sell solutions designed to cut opportunity costs. There often isn't a technical distinction here, but the psychological difference can be huge and the value of cutting opportunity costs can be much higher than the value of reducing labor costs.
For example, some businesses are at capacity because they have some bottleneck that they can't break through with their existing processes. Often you can create software that helps them eliminate some of their bottlenecks and thereby make it possible for them to capture money that they know they have been leaving on the table. They'll value this much higher than a product that would just save them money on labor costs in my experience. And if you can figure out a way to tie the cost of your product directly to their profit, you'll create a feedback loop that will be very valuable to both you and your customers.
