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In the UK, the situation is more extreme, where every so-called 'startup' I find is either working in the payments industry (... truly a new furrow to plough /s) or the coin industry.
True, but surely the point of a startup, with real investors is to make money, not "save the world" or "get your ass to mars". Disappointing really.
often the best returns are in taking things that already have a proven market and making them faster and or cheaper.
if you try to do something new or original you have a mountain to climb. don't listen to the customer.
On the other hand, if you find a problem that people are already spending money to deal with, and you can offer a solution that's better (faster, cheaper, more flexible, more convenient, etc.), then you're in the money. You don't need to be particularly brilliant or creative, just bold enough to try something different.
There will be a few that go for the exceptional route, but the generic startup is going to go for the generic product, for exactly the reason that it became a generic product in the first place.
If you find a novel problem, there are two possibilities. The first is that people have been living without a solution to that problem for 100,000 years and never noticed. It doesn't matter how life changing your solution might be, you will need to convince people that their lives need this particular form of improving. The other possibility is that people are well aware of the problem and everyone before you that ha…
Second, the problem may have existed for some period of time, but only recently has the technology developed to solve it. I'm sure when people had horses and buggies, some of them thought that it would be nice if they could just tell the horses where to go and then go to sleep in the back. That wasn't possible, and it similarly wasn't possible for early cars to have any kind of self-driving technology. Now we're at the point in terms of hardware and software that it at least appears to be a tractable problem.
Most things in general don’t do novel things. Its easier in terms of investing and time spent thinking to merely iterate on an idea thats already proved itself in the marketplace.
Many novel problems that would be worthy to solve don’t have a clear path to monetization. And novel problems are inherent risky since no one has implemented a successful solution before.