Never before seen

I’m constantly amazed by how it seems like every niche market in existence has been monetized. Like there’s no more gold in the mine. There are products, media, and services that stretch across every corner of the internet as if almost every possible idea has been exploited, and yet, there is still an abundance of opportunities waiting to be realized.

Derek Sivers explained this well in his essay Obvious to you. Amazing to others. In the essay, he talks about the number of ideas passed over simply because they seem too obvious. How so many people say, “That has to exist.” Only it doesn’t. Either no one else has ever thought of the idea, or everyone else has passed it over just like you’re about to.

Once it’s imagined, an idea might be ignored for one of two main reasons: either 1) it’s taken as obvious and therefore assumed to exist somewhere or 2) it may not be ‘worth anyone else’s time’, maybe even mistaken as un-monetizable. If your idea falls into either of these two camps, explore it. This might be the time to pounce.

Sure, the idea could very well be of no interest to anybody, but it could also be amazing to somebody. Some of the biggest companies in history were the products of these ideas.

Take Stripe, the online payments platform. To the Collison brothers, the business idea was obvious. It just required tackling a problem no one else wanted to solve: back-end payments. Had Google, Amazon, or Microsoft really cared, they might have blown stripe out of the water. But, to them, it didn’t seem worth the effort or investment. Who really cared about back-end payments anyway?

The founders of Stripe went for it, and today the company is worth $36 billion. *Update (Feb 2021): Stripe is valued at over $115 billion.

So, next time an obvious opportunity approaches you and asks to be explored, take a step further than you might otherwise. Though it seems obvious to you, it might be amazing to others.

And amazing sells.