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I often wonder about the bias of tech entrepreneurs towards only solving problems in tech. There’s such an over-saturation of companies building CMSs, productivity apps, DB-as-service, auth-as-service, etc. meanwhile it’s rare to find great software products for customers outside of tech.

This is such a great opportunity though, and the unicorns we all know are typically startups who have taken a confident step outside of the tech echo chamber and solved problems outside of tech: Uber, AirBnB, DoorDash, Spotify, Zillow, to name a few.

There’s also another problem though trying to emulate these successes. For a long time, venture capital has been focused on finding the next unicorn, which has led to a lot of money being pumped into moonshot ideas to make $10B+ and dismissing ideas that might top out at a few million.

For about two decades, if your idea didn’t involve “disrupting” an entire market, it wasn’t worth investment. This has created a huge gap in the market where we still have a lot of unsolved problems simply because there’s a limited (but still profitable) market.

These problems are everywhere, but as tech professionals, we’re often too isolated from other professions that it’s tough to identify them.