As it turns out, humans are really bad at answering questions about what they need. Often if they knew they needed it, we would be competing to provide the best solution for it.
This is the difference between inductive and deductive analysis. An example of deductive analysis would be tasking a student with applying pattern matching to a known domain to find an expected result. Inductive analysis is when you don’t actually know if there’s an answer to be found. Obviously this is a bigger challenge with a more interesting payoff, but I believe inductive analysis is a skill that can be practiced.
Demand Media realized that humans were really bad at coming up with problems to solve, so they started buying bulk search engine results and harvesting queries where people did not find what they were looking for. They then farm out these non-obvious (and often highly specific) needs to videographers to produce low production value clips that nail these never sexy “how do I fix the towel rack in my bathroom?” type questions.
Demand’s properties dominate the search results advertising for the extreme long tail of semantic Q&A on the web. Last I heard they are releasing thousands of videos a day, and making hundreds of millions in revenues.
If you want to solve a big problem, apply the same inverse deduction logic to the question of which start-ups are really needed (vs. the ones people keep building over and over) and you will be the next Richard Branson.