Great niche markets are valuable secrets. I bought a house in Silicon Valley with money that I make with a side project. It has no competitors because people don’t know how easy it is to make money in this space. Someone with a tech background looking for project ideas would never find it. I’d never say what it is because then my shitty app would immediately be fighting for market share against competitors. Someone may discover the market eventually and kill my app but I’m not going to help anyone do it.

It's interesting to see a counter-example to the otherwise ever-present HN credo of "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything".

On one hand you have execution that can get you an advantage of a difficult-to-reproduce technology stack for solving a problem, but on the other hand, information that other players might not have discovered (yet) also can get you an advantage in the market. Although I find the latter to be less rigid and prone to disruption.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you have found a niche that is not at all in the tech sector, but through technology gets augmented into a proven market-fit? Can I ask you what your process was in finding that niche? You can leave out the specifics of course.

I basically have a shitty Rails app that solves a particular problem for a completely non tech industry (there are millions of such problems). It’s easy for me to find the people who need it. But if I ever had to compete with high quality software my app would probably die.

How are you monetizing your app?

Sounds like you should find someone to write you better software.

Curious to know how you reach your market, if it is completely non-tech. How do you reach new customers and convert them to paying?

Okay I'm going to go figure it out...

Just kidding. I'm glad you're successful, and I hope to find my niche. I think I already have but it isn't successful yet.

Doesn’t matter if you figure it out, you’ll never solve the problem unless you’ve seen it yourself. Imagine an app for plumbers, you’d probably need to know plumbing to make it. It’s like that.

I've once copied a service that took me a weekend to code. Then it took me six months to get a paying customer.