On the bottom of Y Combinator's website, it says "Make something people want." There are troves of data about the American consumer and information about people's desires is so public and easy to obtain. Why is there no easy way to figure out what people want so you can just focus on building said thing?
<i>"If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'"</i> ~~ Henry Ford<p>OK, that's likely apocryphal, but the overall point is kinda valid. People don't always know what they want - <i>because they don't always know what is possible</i>.<p>So the real question requires digging deeper... it's not enough to know "I want a faster horse", you need to know that they really mean "I want to get there faster, and be able to travel much further without having to stop and feed/rest the horse, and I want to travel inside a heated/cooled conveyance, and I want music while I'm in transit" and so on.<p>Now you might argue "Well, the customer <i>could</i> have said all of that" and in a pedantic sense you'd be right. But the typical customer wouldn't have had the imagination to even <i>think</i> that stuff because it would have seemed like science fiction at the time.<p>I think that's the real key to entrepreneurship: combining deeper insights about what people <i>really</i> want/need (based on their words and/or observed actions) with a deep understanding of what's possible at the bleeding edge of technology, and using that combination to build something awesome.<p>Of course that's easier said than done. I mean, I have no idea how to do it myself. But one can keep trying...
Most aren't as good/perceptive as they claim. Also, it became clear many years ago that founders usually need everything spelt out for them. Any product that "hits" usually does so due to luck rather than skill. Also, "me too" is consistently louder than vision.<p>While mountains of data may exist, most don't seek it out, and even if they did, wouldn't know how to process/interpret what's shown.<p>That is, it's all wide open if you know where to look. While some major offerings are satisfactory enough to make it harder to break in, many aren't that great or there's room for competing products.