Fish Where The Fish Are Not The Fishermen

These Day’s AI is booming, or so it looks. Since AI is the only thing people talk it that correlates directly with what people are building. Every startup, backed or bootstrapped is building with “AI”. Some make sense, others seem wildly out of touch with reality. Hence i thought i would write about what kind of businesses to actually build.

So “Fish Where The Fish Are, Not The Fishermen”. Meaning stop building the same thing everyone else is, avoid the saturated or overhyped market. Usually the boring businesses are the ones making money. To illustrate this i want to talk about a software company i heard about from Andrew Wilkinson.

Essentially people that need goverment assistance have to go through a painful process of filling out assitance forms, and it is a huge pain. So the founders decided to building a form software that makes the whole process a lot easier. Theyre doing 30m in revenue a year. It is boring, does not sound sexy, will not get the same headlines as a gpt wrapper that helps you cheat, but it does great. See you would rather find a small pond with a lot of fish and no fishermen, then the dock where all the fishermen and fighting over the fish.

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Although it is a lot easier to say than do. So here are a couple of actionable tips for really finding these pain killer problems.

• Identify problems in your own life that are obvious yet sometimes missed. Look for painkiller problems that you hate.

• Talk to your network, see what problems they have, understand them, and see if it is something that a lot of people have.

• Question manual processes, ask why this is so complicated. Is there a better way of doing this?

Overall, i truly think riding the AI wave is unwise, it is bound to come down, and your business down with it. It may seem attractive to do what everyone eles does, but the businesses that are boring are the ones that tend to be profitable in the short and long term.

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