The six places business opportunities come from
Opportunities are not evenly distributed across the world; they cluster around changes. These six sources account for most of them, and knowing which one you are looking at tells you how much time you have.
- A price that just fell. Something that cost too much last year now costs little enough to build a business on, and the market has not repriced yet.
- A rule that just changed. New regulation creates obligations, and obligations create buyers who have no choice about needing an answer.
- A workflow people still do by hand. Any process where the current tool is a spreadsheet plus a person is a business waiting to be built, and the spreadsheet is public evidence of it.
- An incumbent that stopped caring. A category leader raising prices while its reviews get worse is leaving a segment behind on purpose, and saying so in public.
- A market that exists elsewhere. Something ordinary in one country and absent in another — the cheapest opportunity to spot and the easiest to get wrong, because the reason it is absent is sometimes a good one.
- A group nobody translated for. A product that works fine except that it does not speak the language, take the payment method, or issue the invoice format a whole country requires.
An idea is not an opportunity
An idea is something you thought of; an opportunity is something that is true. The test is whether the statement survives being written without you in it. An app that helps restaurants manage stock is an idea. Independent restaurant owners lose several hours a week reconciling stock by hand and pay an assistant to do it is an opportunity — it is a claim about the world that is either true or false, and you can go and check.
Writing the sentence in that form is not a stylistic preference. It is the step that makes the next one possible, because a claim about the world can be checked against evidence and a description of a product cannot.
Checking one against evidence
Four checks, in this order, because each one is cheaper than the one after it and any of them can end the enquiry. Are there distinct people saying this, or one person with an audience? Does the complaint mention a cost — money, hours, or a workaround they maintain? Is anyone already paying for a worse answer? And is the rate of new complaints holding up, or was the peak eighteen months ago?
The fourth check is the one people skip, and it is the one that distinguishes a market you are early for from a market you are late for. Both look identical in a total count.
Ranking several against each other
Most people do not have one candidate, they have nine, and the real question is which one to spend the year on. Score each on the same axes rather than arguing about them: how many distinct people, how much it costs them, how well the current answers serve them, and which way the last few months point. Then take the one with the widest gap between demand and competition, not the one with the highest demand.
Highest demand is where everyone else also looked. The widest gap is where the demand is real and nobody has arrived yet, which is a different list and usually a less exciting one to read.
Business opportunities in Vietnam specifically
A local market has one structural advantage over a global one: the evidence is written in a language the global incumbents do not read. Vietnamese app-store reviews, forum threads and trade-group posts document demand in detail, and almost none of it reaches an English-language research process — which means the underserved segments stay underserved for longer than the same segment would elsewhere.
The site tracks that market as its own index, scored on the same axes as the global one, so the comparison between a local gap and a global one is a comparison of numbers rather than of intuitions.