Regular people are deep in the digital middle ages. Build for them.

The post below was inspired by a discussion here. I noticed a pattern that resonated with my experience of going indie hacker as a second “career”, which I will mention later.

Speaking very generally, many developers decide to build for the virtual web infrastructure, another piece of the Internet machine, another fragment of the web fabric. It is not surprising given many indie hackers are builders, coders, developers, and often digital natives, integrated with their computers. Product Hunt marketplace abounds in sophisticated products that optimize “virtual life”. When you have a hammer, all you see is nails. I can relate to it, when I was a bio-med scientist in academia I was like that immersed in science problems, without a larger smarter perspective. I paid a prize for being myopic and detached from the outer human reality.

Back to the main thread, I do not have a good term for it so let's call it the virtual-first orientation. Code (the virtual infrastructure) as a source of problems and code (apps, tools, ...) as solutions. Time and time again I can see developers are building smart tools and social media for other developers. Coders work for coders and for the Machine.

On the other hand, the regular people are deep in the digital middle ages. I am not advocating to embark on a mission of bringing them to modern times, but there is an opportunity in changing your perspective from the machine-first orientation to the human-first orientation. Open up and start building for regular people, and in the process educate them, modernize their outdated processes. By the way, educating others is a powerful marketing technique!

There are a couple of ways to get out of this limiting, myopic developer-first view-orientation. You can form a team or an alliance with a domain expert. You can befriend regular people like lawyers or bankers (first choose those with deep pockets and little time, for practical reasons :)). Keeping it simple, if you accept the fact that time is money and smart apps save time, it is just a matter of discovering and understanding good problems in their jobs or lives.

Many work-related problems center around poor, insufficient, messy, disorganized data and information-flow deficiencies, access, ease... Sort of coding problems. Your thoughts?