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on saturated markets:

many of the companies you've never heard of made their money building an easier to use X in a saturated market.

If the dominant company in the industry has not made significant changes to their product in 10 years, then that's an obvious opportunity for a startup, even if the market is completely saturated.

at least in B2B i've found that many companies solve a problem for their customer demographic in year X, grow pretty big, and rake in the cash. They stay stagnant for X+5 to 10 years and they leave their customers frustrated without any real options.

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Another fallacy I hear from people thinking of ideas has to do with "solved problems"

A "solved problem" is just a problem with 1 solution. People are different, customers are different. Is there another way to solve the problem that obsoletes the previous solution?

ex: transportation; solved by "horse and buggy", and then obsoleted by cars and public transportation.



Search on the web was a "solved problem" until Google came along and showed that all of the search engines before then were actually pretty useless. However, until Google came along we didn't know they weren't very good as any kind of web-scale search seemed like a miracle at the time.


Depends on how specific you let the problem be.

Horses (and the first cars) didn't solve the problem to travel 100km in under 1h. Which can be seen as a new problem itself.




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