If you don’t see this, adult business is not for you – new niches for an entrepreneur
It was a coincidence that the article was published against the backdrop of news about the Moscow Exchange, funny…
No matter how many times you see the same opinion, you can no longer find new niches in business. But this is not so. There are dozens of unplowed clearings of any size. And now I will try to share my (and not only) vision of the still untouched estates, which during this decade will turn out to be the most desirable for entrepreneurs.
If a trend can already be tracked in Yandex Metrica or Google Trends, consider the chance lost.
The beginning
When you analyze tons of information and know how to recognize people’s needs, you begin to intuitively sense even absurdly unpredictable events, both in the public consciousness and in business, which is actually the same thing. So this is vision in itself is worth nothing without a number of conditions.
In addition to the trend, you need to consider 3 more things:
timeliness/relevance;
feed – wrapper;
small but important details that you must pay attention to;
easy transition to a new product from an existing product/service model.
Why can’t a cool product be made and sold if you don’t know the intricacies or aren’t passionate about the idea? Because when an idea is implemented “to order,” the performers may miss the very zest that will become key in solving a specific consumer request.
Transformation of legacy IT solutions
Those who daily try to curb the chaos in IT companies will understand me. And it’s not even about the cold wars between developers, HR and DevOPS. Here you need to look at deeper layers. The hiring crisis and prolonged drift in the candidate market have already become commonplace, but this is only a consequence of something more interesting.
To put it very crudely, the developers know that no one else can understand the code except them, and they take advantage of this, calling for 5-7 times longer deadlines. And management and strategic planning are so chaotic and uncontrollable that owners and partners already consider the situation to be the norm.
What if… There would be an application that could speed up development by an order of magnitude. And it's not about control at all. I'm talking about something that programmers will never talk about – extremely inconvenient applications for work:
Constant notifications from 5-10 chats, 95% of which you don’t need. And you can only find out by looking at each one. The main chat, the manager chat, the chat for a specific task – they all merge into one continuous stream of irritation and incredibly slow down work.
To find the necessary link to GitLab, you search for 5-7 links, and only then do you find your own one. It would seem that 10 seconds were spent. Let’s multiply by 50 pings and add time to check all notifications every hour. Approximately 1.5-2 hours from a working day /Delet.
Now correspondence is conducted in one application, and tasks are monitored in another. You have to constantly check everything, literally everything… first you looked in one place, then you set the status (for example, completed work) in another place, for example, in Slack. That is, in essence, you already set the status in Task Manager, but for managers you also need to duplicate it in Slack.
Task managers like Jira themselves look very inconvenient, hundreds of small buttons, a bunch of little-used functions that are only distracting. All this is so crooked and inconvenient that I’m not surprised why the developers are moving deadlines so much – this will at least compensate for the moral damage.
An application that will save everyone from this chaos will make the founders… well, you get the idea.
Such a product already exists, but is still at the development stage. It is carried out by people with whom I communicate personally. It’s interesting to know the opinions of all sides in the comments – is this relevant to you personally?
Request for Strategic Thinking
If chess was previously associated with strategic thinking, then by the end of this decade the ancient Asian game of Go will be on the crest of the wave. Especially among business representatives, managers, marketers, architects (if we speak the language of it).
Briefly about Go – a board game created in Ancient China. Its rules and principles are ridiculously simple, but it is so deep and complex that in East Asian countries it is considered an integral tool for developing the thinking abilities of children. And top managers and businessmen of the East rely on its philosophy and principles as a basis.
Now the main popularizer of the game is a pro-player Alexander Dinerstein.
From personal experience I can say that the deeper you understand the new levels of the game, the more unexpected little things you begin to notice in any area of life. And any strategy that I unexpectedly noticed in projects of any scale was always based on some kind of Go principle.
Revealing new levels of strategic planning and noticing connections that most even smart people deny to the last, I put together a coherent system for leveling up this skill. It turned into a whole book. It is not and will not be freely available – it is important for me to convey these thoughts only to those close to me. An interesting feature is that each new reader gives very valuable feedback. In order to get the opinion of complete strangers (however, close ones can give a slightly distorted assessment), I decided to show people who have passed several barriers. I'll say a little more at the end of the article.
Correspondence with a person who read the first 5 chapters, which are already ready:
Association of Entrepreneurs
The demand for adult and mutually beneficial networking among entrepreneurs is constantly increasing. But at the same time, business reputation seemed to be relegated to the background. I constantly notice this mistake among my friends – it’s better to be a careless fool, but one of your own, than to have a competent and responsible partner with whom it’s not very pleasant to communicate.
Another fatal mistake of offline entrepreneurs is distance and even direct confrontation with competitors. From experience – when a friend of mine was launching a taxi company in a provincial town, the only monopolist competitor very aggressively hinted to the “newcomer” that it was better not to meddle here. More than 6 years have passed, and now that same monopolist periodically comes to my friend and asks for business advice. But the chance is lost, what kind of help can we talk about for such a person?
The hero of this short story is constantly searching and, interestingly, finding new “mini-clearings” offline. Examples are the repair of Chinese mopeds and their resale a little cheaper than new ones, or a bakery (in the vast majority of small towns it is impossible to find tasty bread, but you know what kind of baked goods you buy from retail chains). I expressed an outside view of this taxi driver (director of the taxi company) here.
If you know clubs with a business atmosphere of adult, serious entrepreneurship, I will be glad to see your comment.
Monetization of loneliness
The number of single people is growing exponentially. Reasons 3:
Attitudes towards marriage and long-term unions are changing. Young people see no reason to go to the registry office. You don’t even need to mention divorce statistics. And the control – the already unconcealed confrontation between the men's and women's movements gives rise to a profound rethinking of family values.
The transition to remote work also made a contribution – the partners began to spend so much time together that they began to see previously hidden sides of each other.
Real communication was gradually replaced by surrogates. If previously, to meet a person you really had to see each other in person, now almost all stages of interaction take place virtually.
How to use it? Loneliness gives rise to certain needs that, among family people, close on their own. And let's not talk about food delivery and cleaning – that's trivial.
The main areas in which you should look are doctors at home, health products, men's jewelry, products for outdoor activities, everything to improve sleep and create maximum comfort in the house purely for yourself, without relying on anyone else.
Psychological disorders and their treatment
Online psychological consultations, as well as pharmaceutical products to relieve anxiety and everything connected with it, are increasingly in demand.
Another request – online psychotherapist:
Children and business
Even a good diploma, extensive experience and solid skills no longer guarantee a bright future. These sentiments are in the air. Especially for those who work for themselves. In entrepreneurial circles, there is a very persistent request for their heirs to join the business.
One problem is that existing courses and offline events only create pathos. And they focus on blogging/information business. And serious business tycoons and businesswomen of 40-50 years old want to see future Rockefellers in their children. Who think about serious things, and don’t act out on Tik Tok. Online schools cannot yet accommodate this request. Training programs are not designed to provide a real ticket to the future. They are made according to the principle “How to entertain the child and at the same time reassure the parents.”
Business education for children and adolescents is now in its infancy. The approach must be comprehensive and at the same time individual. Simply hiring former accounting employees and compiling disparate methodologies will not work.
Climax
It just so happened 😉 That a project capable of satisfying 70% of the voiced requests is already at the testing stage. And your humble servant is among the founders. I have already described briefly and to the point the visible part of the project Here.
If interested, welcome to channel, where I will post all the news. There you can still pre-order the book, the opportunity to become a partner of the project and something else.
conclusions
Uncertainty of the future, mistrust, futility of classical education and lack of confidence in the future among representatives of all segments of the population – all these prerequisites create chaos. And the main request is for him to let go. The main lesson is that trying to control a dynamic and incredibly complex system only increases its unpredictability. It is enough to accept everything as it is and not get lost in the maze of self-made frames.
