Insight-first

What's your business insight?

Hi all —

This week, I was listening to this podcast that interviewed Floodgate Capital founder Mike Maples, Jr.

He articulated something I’ve been thinking about for a while: Insights come first.

Before you find product-market fit, before you pull together your core business logic, you need to have some sort of insight about why you believe an opportunity exists.

What’s causing the world to change, such that a business opportunity is emerging?

For my business, it’s pretty simple: We realized that it’s getting harder and harder to find hourly staff. And, neither employers nor existing HR tech were prepared for the hard-to-hire future.

That’s our insight. The opportunity, business model, and everything else emerge from that insight. And as long as we’re right about our insight, we’ll be riding a wave of change that powers our small team to the promised land.

What’s your insight?

A few random ones that I’ve thought about recently:

• With the rise of remote work, it’s getting harder to recruit employees. Which means that there’s going to be a rise in recruiters and recruiting firms, and a bunch of opportunities to build software for them.

• Also with the rise of remote work, we can move wherever we want… and that’s overwhelming. There’s going to be a rise in demand for services that help prospective homebuyers choose their cities, towns, and even states and countries of residence.

Rob