Don't try to create a new market

The most successful companies have invented markets that didn’t exist. Microsoft invented the personal computer, Google invented the search engine, Facebook invented social networks. People starting out thinking of new business ideas often skew heavily to ones that loosely match “No one knows that they need this, but once they see it and try it, they will love it”.

But actually those companies didn’t really invent those ideas - there were other social networks before Facebook, other search engines before Google. And those companies didn’t start from nothing. And there was probably some amount of luck involved.

It’s very hard to convince people to give you money for products or services. If they don’t understand what those products or services are, it’s 100x harder. And no matter how smart and creative you are, there’s a very good chance that someone had your amazing idea before and tried it and that the reason you’ve never heard of it before is because it failed to find product market fit.

So in nearly all cases it’s better to find an existing product or service and do something a bit different, but not so completely different that you can’t tell people what it is you’re doing.