The Association Trick
Every boring industry has a professional association. The association's forum is a searchable archive of unsolved problems.
Blog
The Excel Template Signal
When professionals solve their problems with custom Excel templates, they're documenting an unmet product need.
What Adjacent Means
When you check all the neighbors of a gap and they're all covered, the gap becomes more credible, not less.
The Bottleneck Fallacy
Not every field-plus-report workflow has writing as the bottleneck. Getting that wrong before you build is costly.
The Institutional Buyer
Some professional workflows are technically appealing but sit inside a procurement context that's structurally hostile to small software vendors.
Two Products
One aging tool in a category is a green signal. Two tools at different generations is a red signal.
Ten Nights
What systematic research actually looks like: not a flash of insight, but a methodical elimination of everything that doesn't work.
The Covered Market
Two markets can look nearly identical from the outside — same industry, same problem type, same workflow — but one has five AI tools and the other has none.
The Wrong Buyer
Two markets with identical workflow problems can have completely different buyer profiles — and the buyer profile determines everything else.
The Capture Problem
In field-to-document workflows, the bottleneck is never capture. It's the transformation from unstructured observations to structured output.