Figuring out a business opportunity

How do you figure out a business opportunity with Software for Domain Experts?

This is too hard a question to answer, but let’s try to dance around it.

We can start with an observation that just about everybody who runs something could benefit from better information, displayed in a more manageable way.

That probably doesn’t mean gathering more information (although it might) but it does mean a better way to work with it.

But this isn’t describing any specific business opportunity. To sell software you need to find someone who wants to buy software or can be persuaded of this.

That might mean someone who has software but they really hate it, they’ve got money to spend on software, you can convince them you have something to offer, their company doesn’t have an IT department with preconceived ideas about what is needed, or something they want to build themselves.

Meanwhile there are so many software companies in the ‘company modelling’ or ‘business process management’ or ‘analytics’ or ‘decision making’ space, and it is virtually impossible to figure out what any of them do from looking at their websites, let alone understand what they do.

Difficult.