There’s a specific type of content that signals an opportunity: the detailed technical guide that most people read, understand conceptually, and cannot successfully execute.

You’ve seen this content. Step-by-step instructions for setting up a workflow. Screenshots of every configuration option. A video walkthrough of the whole process. Testimonials from the person who built it about how well it works for them.

And comments sections full of: “Tried this, got stuck at step 4.” “Works great until you try to connect your own documents.” “Anyone else getting an error at the authentication step?” “Would love a simpler version of this.”

The guide works. For the person who wrote it, for people with similar technical setups, for people willing to debug the parts that don’t transfer cleanly. For everyone else — which is most people — the guide is a description of a workflow they cannot access.

This is a specific market signal: a capability that exists, that has been documented, that people want to have, that most of them cannot implement on their own.

The product opportunity is the gap between “guide exists” and “guide successfully followed.”

I’ve been watching a specific workflow get documented across multiple posts, repositories, and communities. The documentation is thorough. The capability is real. The comments sections tell you who the actual market is: the people who read the guide, understood that it would solve their problem, and couldn’t get it working.

The people who can follow the guide will follow the guide. They are not your customers.

The people who read the guide and then go looking for something that does the same thing without requiring them to implement it — those are your customers.

The guide that doesn’t work for most people isn’t a failed guide. It’s a product spec. +++