Many of the big web services companies that develop software use such as AWS, Mailchimp, Sendgrid et al work around this idea. A lot of people decided to build startups. Those started first servicing a handful of startups and were able to grow and sell to Fortune 100 companies.<p>In the Blockchain hype era for example building KYC tools, social media marketing consulting for Crypto or coinmarketcap and so on, as others have suggested would have worked well.<p>You will generally want to provide a service that people would pay for in order to build their "great scheme masterplan", meanwhile others will try to do as well and eat their market, becoming your customers as well. While they race to the bottom in pricing and become unicorns, you take their money and grow your business silently.<p>Instead of making a brewing company in a city where there is a lot of hype, consider owning stocks of the local water/wheat etc provider, because the beer hype will drive up prices of other things as when people compete, they take investment and try to grow fast in the promise of huge returns, meanwhile you sell those to everyone that bought the hype with less investment and if there is a champion on this battle, you can sell as well your business to the winner. Looks like a decent strategy if you ask me.<p>For now, to be honest, we are more like heading to recession so I would rather look into servicing people in debt or looking for ways to save money, avoid losing too much in the crisis and so on. More like selling wipers to the people who are crying in a time of crisis than shovels in a gold rush.
Selling video/ebook courses on any of the following "get ___ quick" fads:<p>- Crypto trading<p>- Keto/Intermittent Fasting<p>- Dropshipping on Amazon/Shopify<p>- "Booty guides", namely Word docs converted to PDF w/ fitness routines and nutritional information sold by influencers/fitness models<p>- Data Science/ML/AI ("skills of the future")<p>- Learn to code-style courses ("Become a Web Developer 2019 Ultimate Package" and the like)
Selling React and AI courses on Udemy.<p>And that's not a knock against the courses. Stephen Grider, for example, sells some very excellent shovels.
Look at kickstarter for hugely overfunded projects. I think of the typical "If we get 50,000 US$ we build you a 3D printer for 400 US$". And then, some time later: "whoops, we burned through the 10,000,000US$ we made on KickStarter and can't deliver".<p>(btw, a little bit OT: I always wonder why people don't cap their projects to avoid scaling from a few 100 units (or whatever is managable by packaging the stuff at home for a week or two) to the 10,000s (for which you'll want some more advanced logistics); I can always run a second campaign after I delivered a great, first iteration of the product...)
To answer your question, I guess anything that applies to a market where there is a big rise of newcomers. Like new programmers and coding bootcamps.<p>If I only knew, I wouldn't tell you. I think what makes sense is to check out what thing was already growing in 2018 and will still be growing in 2019, but entry is relatively easy. Also if there is a possibility that this thing is gonna be talked about a lot in upcoming months, you've found yourself a market that you can sell your shovels to. Now, quick, find out what people may need and make it before someone else will and you got yourself a shovel.
Gold rush: crate subscriptions. Shovel seller: cratejoy.<p>Gold rush: phone apps. Shovel sellers: AppAnnie, Braze, etc.<p>Basically, finding a trend people are chasing in hopes of making money, and selling them tooling to facilitate their business - in such a way that you make money whether they succeed or fail.<p>If you’re looking for the next digital gold rush to sell shovels for, machine learning and IoT don’t seem to have any clear market leaders for tooling yet.<p>If you can predict what comes next after that, there may be even better ways to take advantage of that than selling shovels.
In 1996-2003: running a payment service provider for dot-coms who wanted to actually do B2C sales on the internet. Rewind to 1996 and Paypal and similar didn't exist, getting permission to do cardholder-not-present transactions was a black art, and most companies used EPOS terminals talking to Visa/Mastercard or a local franchisee (depends on the country) via modem over POTS, with about 10-30 second latency to make an authorisation check (and only one auth check per phone call).<p>In 2019: look for something that disintermediates supply and demand (or, much rarer and harder, something wholly new that nobody can supply yet and which has vast potential demand).
Only slightly less mainstream than the "crypto" answer everyone has, is the whole "bots" revolution that was supposed to happen in 2016, then 2017, then 2018; and the related FB Messenger and Slack bots store.<p>There had been pretty much no killer apps on FB Messenger or Slack (yes there are a few profitable ones and some businesses built on them, but nothing like the mobile app stores from back in the days). If you were in the "bots communities" (on various social networks) like I was, you'd see that most entrepreneurs simply try to profit off of the rush by building "easily build a bot" services. (e.g. the Chatfuels of the world) I think it's an example where more people try to sell shovels than actually mine for gold.
Shipping companies make so much money "selling shovels" that Amazon has decided to become their own cargo airline.<p>The hottest example lately is cloud hosting providers who don't have to invent software (which is hard) but simply stick on a server (which is relatively easy).
Create a data science focused product and sell it. Let people "dig" for their data, as there's supposedly value in it. Create ASICs for Crypto currency mining. That's probably the most directly analogous.
coinmarketcap - this site is freaking HUGE and printing money for its owners. There are much better alternatives today, but these guys were the first and they made a lot of money