Tag: opportunity

I was talking with a friend about my plan to invest in developing WordPress plugins as products recently.

“That’s a tough market,” he said, “Everything has been built.  Customers don’t want to pay anything.  You make $100 a year off a plugin and still have to support it.”

He’s right.

We built a WordPress plugin four or five years ago and the market was saturated then.  Because of the scope of functionality, it was a pain to support and actually cost us to maintain it.  

Natural opportunities that are inherently accessible and rewarding don’t seem to exist anymore.  

What I’m striving to learn is how to identify hidden opportunities.

I’ve a friend who is in the early stages of developing an innovative app.  Recently, he was disheartened when he was looking in the app store and discovered that someone had already built it.

I’ve been there several times.  You think you’ve identified an opportunity or unexploited idea and get really excited.  And then a couple weeks into working on it you stumble across someone who has already done it.  Fuck!

In our current age, it’s incredibly difficult to find unexploited opportunities.  

There are massive incentives to create solutions and few barriers to do so.  Products continuously spawn in this fertile environment- all the way down into the crevices of every microscopic niche and razor thin vertical.

First mover advantage is not going to happen for most of us.

But this isn’t bad, because there are some real advantages to being a Johnny-come-lately.  Not only should you not be dejected by our high competition environment, you should embrace it.  

Because it’s ripe for pirates.