Selling software and data systems to lawyers is actually a huge business, there exist multiple billion dollar businesses selling to lawers ranging from legal reference systems to machine learning discovery tools.
Sure. SOMEBODY is making money off them. Can you, as a solo founder, not a lawyer, though? That's the question.
SOMEBODY will win the lottery. That doesn't actually increase your chances.
Everything I write, all the advice I give, is increasing the chance that the person I'm talking to will experience success. Some people get rich off consumer products. Some people get rich selling sex, or cool, or experiences. Some people do manage to sell into very tough (but lucrative) industries. But those are all a lot harder than taking the easy path of creating tools for people like you, who have problems you can solve, and who pay money.
Me, I don't like risk. I also never tell people that my way is the only way. It's simply the way with the highest likelihood of returns.
EDIT: By the by, I recently sold back my 12% share in a VERY promising, disruptive startup in the legal space… WITH insider knowledge and connections. The major cofounders worked their tails off for years doing everything right and for their troubles? They got almost zero buy-in. Then they clawed back shares for one last do-or-die thrust (which imo is more likely to be die than do). Unlike many people, I'm speaking from experience.
The argument made is that lawyers don't spend money on software, that's hugely different from saying "solo founder without a domain background" can't sell to lawyers.
Er, you did? The whole post was a log of an actual conversation I had with Nathan, which I made as clear as a person could possibly make it. The headline is "Me & Nathan Talking About His App Experiment."
What really happened here isn't that you misread, but that you didn't read.
"I know Hacker News types think that’s a great list of niches, but it’s actually a really terrible one. You can’t sell to ANY of those people."
Even as a conversation between two people it's ambiguous what the "you" means, in spoken english it would be distinguished by emphasis.
For example "YOU can’t sell to any of those people." would imply the speaker is referring specifically to the addressee, but "You can’t sell to ANY of those people." would imply a generic "you" referring to the general case of being able to sell to those people.
