Stop building 'general purpose' tools—specialization is where the money is hiding

I used to think that the bigger the market, the better the opportunity. I wasted months trying to build tools that 'everyone' could use, only to realize that when you build for everyone, you end up building for nobody.

Yesterday, I was digging into the HR tech space. It's crowded, noisy, and honestly, most of the software is painful to use. My instinct was to run the other way. Why compete with billion-dollar giants?

But then I saw something that changed my mind.

A small team is going after the 'Big Three'—Workday, Oracle, and SuccessFactors. They aren't trying to replace them. They're building a hyper-specific layer on top of them just to handle compliance and onboarding.

Here's the insight: Companies are spending millions on these platforms, but their employees still have no idea how to use them. In a hybrid work world, you can't just tap your neighbor on the shoulder and ask how to submit a payroll change.

By narrowing their focus to HR compliance alone, they've turned a boring 'general' tool into an enterprise necessity. They're using AI to map out cross-app journeys—like how a request starts in Slack and ends in Workday—without making the user set up manual triggers.

It's a reminder that 'narrow' isn't 'small.' Narrow is actually how you get your foot in the door when the big players are too slow to innovate on the UX.

I’ve been obsessed with finding these kinds of high-signal gaps lately. It beats guessing what to build next.

I built a tool to help automate this kind of market research → https://ideatolaunch.co

Have you ever found a niche that seemed too small at first, but ended up being a goldmine because the competition was too broad?