Suggestions to find a business opportunity in a developing country

1 points by alberich 14y ago ↗ HN

I'd like to know what is your suggestions to find a business opportunity in a developing country, more precisely in Brazil.

I've been looking out to find problems that I could solve for small business. I confess that as a graduate student I'm having a hard time discovering possible niches to work on. I feel like i'm on a desert, I can't come up with my own ideas but I don't know what small businesses need as I've been doing mostly distributed systems research, except for some time that I worked as a programmer on a legal firm developing internal systems. Entrepeneurship looks like some secret cult here.

Most discussions here on hacker news seems to be focused on consumer services; it seems hard to apply the advice given on those situations in an economic environment like Brazil, where legal requirements are complex, taxes are high, and there is lack of venture capital for funding.

Self-funded businesses targeting small business clients seem to have a greater chance of surviving. Sure it won't be the next twitter or facebook, but I'm more interested in having creative freedom and enough money to have a regular life (i.e. I don't need to own yatch).

With this context in mind, what would you suggest as a good approach to find business opportunities?

3 comments

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teyc 14y ago ↗

How can you say entrepreneurship is a secret cult when there are so many small businesses in Brazil?

Your problem right now is you lack domain specific knowledge. Over here in Australia, there are several software companies focussing on agribusinesses. What is there to say there isn't similar needs in Brazil?

alberich 14y ago ↗

By "secret cult" I was trying to mean that there's a lack of data about it's practice, you know? It's hard to find people sharing their experiences on entrepeneurship like you find here.

I totally agree with you about the lack of domain knowledge. What do you think is a good way to develop this knowledge? To get a job on some company outside my field (i.e. software development)?

Let's say you want to target the agrisoftware business. You might see if they don't have a tablet offering - then write a simple data collection app for farmers. There'd surely be forums online to give you some idea. Then show it to them, and see if they want to license it or buy your company.

You can also pick an industry and field questions on LinkedIn or Quora.