that is kind of part of the equation. these super successful one-person shows build things that sound extremely niche, trivial to sometimes even stupid. But that is the reason they can grow their companies under the radar. the key part is that they know about a real pain their audience has and that audience happens to be much much bigger than outsiders or even the founders themselves thought/think.

Finding a market like that sounds really difficult to do. How does someone discover a market like this without a ton of luck?

As someone who pulled this off, it was less about discovery and more about being part of it already. The problems are much easier to understand and address when they're actually problems you're facing yourself.

Mine isn't anywhere near paying the bill yet, but it's at 60+ customers for $20/year.

It's exactly as you described. I had a pain point which was trivial for most, but not for me. No existing solutions solved it properly so I decided to make it myself.

While searching for a solution, I found that a lot of other people had the same problem. It was bad enough for them that they took time out of their day to write their complaints online.

In solving my own problem, I was creating something that other people might've pay for. And they did!

I quickly learned that marketing was the most important part of the process.

You say it's luck.

I say the universe is sending you lots of signals.

Most people ignore those signals. The "lucky" ones are simply perceptive.

To give you a concrete example.

There was this app Screenhero that was acquired by Slack in 2017.

There was a HN thread about it and it erupted with people saying "oh no, I'm using this and it'll go away. how awful!".

The thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15552042 333 points, 147 comments

Just from that thread you could tell:

* there's an app with obvious business model (monthly pay per user), immune to piracy (everything is mediated by their servers; no account, the app doesn't work) * the functionality was deemed valuable enough by Slack to acquire a startup that barely got off the ground * people love this app

The Universe sent a clear signal.

Hacker News is supposed to be a breeding ground for hackers that are interested in building software businesses.

How many of the people that read the Slack HN acquisition thread fired up Visual Studio or XCode and started building a copy of Screenhero?

Zero. Everyone ignored the signal.

It's even worse than that. I actually made that point in 2017, in that same HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15555488

I spelled out the obvious opportunity for the tens of thousands of people who must have read that post. It was even the top voted comment.

Everyone ignore the signal.

BTW: "clone Screenhero" opportunity is mostly gone. Not completely but there are at least 2 startups cloning it.

I'm pretty sure it took at least 2 years before they started copying Screenhero (one of the startups is actually by a guy from the original team, I think).

So for at least 2 years there was a clear opportunity to build a multi-million dollar business by a very small team.

But your example, Screenhero clones like Pop (https://pop.com/), are in a large, competitive market. That doesn’t fit the qualifications of a small, underserved niche like the article describes.

I fit very well in the article description. It's not only about finding the right niche and riding the wave, is also about execution, otherwise competitors will eat you.

There's luck involved of course, but after 10 failed tries you'll get an eye for it. Just an example: there are sub-markets that don't have specialized products, they all use products built for everyone instead that specific niche, like instead of a CRM for everyone niche it down as CRM for mechanics (i'm sure there are many of them, but you get the idea).

by being directly involved in other areas and seeing the problems that non-developers wouldn't know how to fix

the problem with most software engineers is they only know tech. Most of these "niche" businesses are created at the intersection of tech and marketing/design/business

It’s very often a niche the founder themselves are part of. If the founder writes content and builds a headline A/B tester, it’s often possible to make a tool, so some adwords and marketing and get a couple thousand sales at less than a $100 a month each.

> A headline generator or optimizer?

Headlime used GPT-3 so you could write a prompt and it would produce copy for your landing page.

It may have been niche, but it would really well and helped rather than having to brainstorm my own.

When you have the whole world as your market, even super niche products can make a lot of money.