Build a Cannon to Kill a Mosquito

There are two kinds of startup ideas that succeed:

• Business ideas like Uber that solve real-world problems, starting with niche users and expanding over time.
• Technology breakthroughs like OpenAI that push the frontier of intelligence. They’re hard to build but see massive adoption once achieved.

But there’s a third kind: solving a small, overlooked problem in a popular product—a missing feature many users desperately need. Something like beautifying Google Forms. For Google, it's a mosquito not worth swatting. For a third-party developer, solving it requires recreating Google Forms' interface, since it's not available through standard APIs. It takes enormous effort—more like building a cannon to kill that mosquito. But sometimes, that cannon reveals gold.

About Mani Doraisamy
Mani writes meta code (AI, rule engine, middleware). He has been building tools for Google Workspace customers for over 15 years and enjoy creating products for them.