[andrewcamel]

This type of story is so motivating to build vertical software, but for people like me who are trying to identify a vertical software opportunity, it's discouraging that these developers needed to spend a couple years in the industry to truly understand the pain point behind FarmLogs.

Does anyone have thoughts / strategies around identifying these opportunities, ideally without the need to spend years in the target industry?

[raquo]

* Your hobbies and interest groups

* Your job (harder if it's just building tools for web developers)

* Your family members and friends' jobs & hobbies

* Basically anyone willing to talk about their problems with you

[jamesjyu]

Unfortunately, you need to gain a lot of tacit knowledge about an industry to really solve the right problems for it. That takes time and dedication.

There are some ways to speed it up by talking to lots of experienced people, reading analyst papers, researching, or even shadowing a person in the industry for a week. However, nothing beats first hand knowledge.

[andrewcamel]

I think you get at a great point that the onky way to solve the right problems is to be committed to learning about an industry through all available information channels. To be comfortable spending that much time on one specific industry though I think means you need to come in with a thesis to begin with, which to avoid circular idea justification means you probably need to come into it with a broader, more abstract thesis independent of industry knowledge.

[hemantv]

There is no free lunch.

[ecesena]

Co-founder(s) with domain expertise?