How to be emmersed in an industry
I’ve realised that real success in business often comes from identifying a problem — or a better way of doing something — within a specific industry or niche, then building a product or service around it.
The challenge is that many of these problems are difficult to notice unless you’ve spent years working in that industry. People with long-term experience naturally see inefficiencies, frustrations, and gaps that outsiders usually miss.
Since I don’t yet have deep industry exposure, I see two possible ways to overcome this:
- Study a market in extreme detail until patterns and problems become obvious.
- Interview experienced people in the industry and gather insights directly from them — although this has been harder than I expected.
yet these two ways have pitfalls for example some information relating to a industrys problems is not public domain and its hard to just walk into a engineering firm and start asking the workers questions.
For example, this founder said:
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That kind of insight seems to come from years of firsthand experience.
So my question is: can someone with little to no experience — say 6 months — realistically identify opportunities like the above example? Or are these kinds of problems mostly hidden from outsiders and only visible to people deeply embedded in the industry?
Is their fool proof method to getting access to these industry gate kept problems?
Would love to hear your thoughts