Some of the worst business ideas I ever had came to me when I was living on Bali
How everything you think is downstream from what you read, who you spend time with, and what you do.
I wrote about this as well in the context of how to exercise free will. But I encountered this again in the past week as I spent 20-30 hours doing front-line moderation work at Carousell to learn the ins and outs of what my team does to fight scams. Immediately, I started getting ideas for products that are missing in the Fraud Management space. Why do we have to build our own UI for something like blocking a suspicious login? Why are there no off-the-shelf components for this included with the tool? Why do you need to have so much technical and statistical knowledge to use fraud prevention tools? Where is the AI for this?
There are clearly many huge opportunities in this space. But I wasn’t aware of these front-line problems until I experienced them myself. Developing an instinct for which problems are valuable to solve and what kind of solutions are marketable is one thing, but exposure to the problems in the first place is a hard prerequisite. I sometimes think back to how bad the business ideas were I had when I lived on Bali. As a digital nomad surrounded by other digital nomads, living on a tropical island where 60-70% of the economy is tourism, all I came up with were product ideas for digital nomads, and unserious F&B ideas1. The problems I had as a digital nomad felt like minor luxury problems, boring to think about, and even potential solution did not look commercially viable (small, fragmented market of stingy, high-churn customers).
On the other hand, while working in a big’ish company, it’s easy to find interesting problems everywhere, that are also valuable to solve. One reason that very young entrepreneurs aren’t as successful as founders in their 40s and 50s2 is that they just haven’t had the chance to find good problems. That’s why I would always recommend people in their 20s to just go and work in a bunch of industries that seem interesting, and think about entrepreneurship a bit later after 3-5 years or so.
People ask me all the time what my next startup is going to be, and the short answer is I don’t know what, or when. But I do really like my work at Carousell now for it’s insight into what type of products a company of that size spends money on, and what gaps there are that it might spend future money on. Getting my hands into Trust & Safety this year is great for the same reason. That is a niche that an ambitious student armed with AI and an almost infinite supply of time to tinker almost certainly doesn’t know anything about. So, maybe good career advice is: If you want to make money, become a generalist in an opaque3 field, and then become an entrepreneur in that same field.
The top three were:
The Cricket Cafe: a fancy ‘Shady Shack’ type of place where all the food is made from insect sources, one of the most sustainable sources of protein in the world. Think cricket flower wraps with salads in them for the less adventurous, to big fat crunchy fried crickets with cajun spices for the more daring.
A sushi place on Lombok in a quiet spot called Ekas Bay. I went there to surf twice, and the food options were limited. Most of the fish you can get on Bali gets caught around Lombok (or so I heard back then). The cool thing about sushi is that the only thing that’s perishable is the fish, and for that you’re at the source. Everything else (rice, soy sauce, wasabi, nori, sake, beer, pickled ginger) are pantry stocks that don’t need to be refrigerated.
[Rejected for being cynical, i.e. exploiting dumb rich people which I would never want to spend my time on, as profitable as it may be] A shop in Canggu that sells water from different natural springs and waterfalls. The water will claim to have healing powers, and it will be super nicely packaged and targeted at gullible rich ‘eat pray love’ type of tourists. It will also be very expensive and sold at 95% gross margin.
Opaque doesn’t mean small. It has to be a HUGE opaque field since you can build a small company in a big market, but you can’t build a huge company in a small market