> My advice for finding ideas is to get out of the ecosystem of companies in the Big Tech or Silicon Valley traditions and go and work for tiny little companies where all the office staff work in the same room and your job is to modernise a C++ application that has a hard dependency on Microsoft Office 2003 and runs on a VM running Windows XP (which was the first programming job I got when I left teaching in 2021). Those businesses are full of problems that are easily solved with computers, but no one who knows how to solve those problems has discovered those problems yet.

Agreed. Except: smaller companies tend to have much smaller budgets and be less tolerant when it comes to software pricing.

I would also say from experience that there is either a lot of commonalities in the types of issues that these companies face OR they have some very unique needs. In the former case one might as well abstract away and try to attack these problems in the general case. In the latter we need to hope that the niche can be big enough to be profitable.