Some problems just aren't that valuable to solve. I use tons of neat little tools like jsondiff.com that just aren't really worth paying for. Monetising those products would make them less pleasant to use, and I'd move to something else.
Some things can just remain simple and free, and that's fine.
Even small problems may be hidden economic launch pads, given that the ingenuity to make their solutions profitable is likely to provide surprising insights.
Generic approaches to making an unprofitable niche more profitable to serve:
- Generalize the problem in some novel but useful way, so the solution has increased market size
- Generalize to a user customizable solution, to offload costs of complete specialization
- Reduce the costs of creating the solution in some way, such as new specialized tooling
- Divide up the problem/solution into subproblems/solutions whose potential value as a flexible toolkit is greater than a monolithic solution.
- Identify a small market that having adopted a small unprofitable solution will now be easy customers for related products, i.e. amortizing the initial cost across the long term value of customer contacts
Thinking deeply about the specifics of a problem once may result in more novel specific approaches.