Part of an ongoing map I am building in public. Come think with me.
Last week I published the first piece in this series. A framework for scoring US market gaps based on pain, frequency, and how weak the existing solutions were. The rankings felt right. People engaged. It felt like I had landed something.
It felt right, until it did not.
I thought I was ranking opportunities. Instead, I stumbled into a question I still do not have an answer to.
A few weeks ago I published a framework for finding market gaps. It scored industries on pain, frequency, market size, and competition. The rankings felt right. Then I kept using it, and something kept happening. The same problem would come up in very different conversations. Healthcare came up and everyone saw a clear business opportunity. Immigration came up and everyone agreed it mattered, but few saw a way to make money from it, so a lot of people walked away. The problem had not changed. The person looking at it had.
I started comparing markets, industries, and countries side by side. At first I thought I was improving a scoring framework. What I eventually realized was that opportunities do not have a single ranking. They have audiences. And every audience is asking a different question.
Healthcare administration is the one I kept coming back to. And it kept bothering me. The numbers told me these markets looked similar. Every conversation I had told me they were not.
US hospitals spent $43 billion in 2025 just collecting payments insurers already owed. Score it with any framework and it tops the list. Score the same problem in India and it comes out almost as high. Both correct. But sit with both side by side, and the paths to building something are completely different.
Hospitals have IT budgets, procurement departments, and dedicated software spend. A founder can build a SaaS tool and have a paying customer within a year.
$43B in collection costs · AHA 202655% of healthcare spending is out of pocket. 40% of providers cite cost as the main barrier to going digital. The conversion is harder, the resistance is different, the timeline is longer.
Only 53% digitalized · EY India 2025So I kept a running list of every factor that seemed to matter. Twelve. Then ten. Then eight. Every comparison killed one more until the survivors stopped disappearing.
And when I lined the survivors up, they split cleanly into two groups. Some told me whether a problem was worth solving. Others told me whether I could actually reach it. The moment I saw that split, something clicked. I had not built a better score. I had accidentally built two different maps.
I call what is left The Builder's Map, because a map looks different depending on where you are standing.
Eight factors. Two layers.
Scored separately, not blended. An Opportunity of 9 and Execution of 2 is not a 5.5. It is "incredible opportunity, brutal to build." The Execution layer is where countries diverge most.
Each set of weights I tried turned out to be a person.
These three are starting points, not the whole list. A VC reads this map differently than a solo founder. A government planner reads it differently than a nonprofit.
Triple the weight on Willingness to Pay. Watch two industries swap places.
| Industry | Original | Score | New Score | New Rank | Move |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Legal Tech | 4 | 7.5 | 8.2 | 2 | ↑ jumped 2 |
| Immigration Services | 3 | 7.6 | 6.1 | 5 | ↓ dropped 2 |
Legal Tech jumped: law firms are already spending. Tech spending grew 9.7% in 2025, the fastest the industry has seen.
Immigration dropped: the pain is just as real, but the people experiencing it have almost no software budget. $527M market versus legal tech's $34B.
That immigration result kept nagging at me, though. The framework was doing exactly what I built it to do. It took me a while to see why that bothered me.
The lenses are not types of people. They are types of questions. The same person can pick up one lens for one problem and a different lens for another.
I have to be honest. I was feeling pretty good about all of this. The factors made sense. The lenses made sense. The map was holding up across every comparison I threw at it. I was excited about where this was going. Then I came across a podcast that challenged everything I had built.
It was a My First Million episode with Barry Ritholtz, the fund manager. Somewhere in the middle, someone brought up Zillow. The founder, Rich Barton, looked at housing data in the early 2000s. Messy. Unstructured. Locked away with real estate agents. No homeowner had ever paid for organized property information. By every signal that existed at the time, it was not a business.
He built it anyway. And the world adjusted around him.
That is the part that broke my confidence. If I had run Zillow's moment through my own framework honestly, every score would have said walk away. High pain, sure. But low willingness to pay. No clear buyer. No existing budget. The kind of profile that today looks a lot like immigration looks on my map.
That is what the example unlocked for me. The framework measures data. It cannot measure the moment a population decides to trust software for something they used to do offline. It cannot measure conviction. It cannot measure the years between "nobody pays for this" and "everyone pays for this."
So I have stopped labeling problems "social impact" just because willingness to pay is low today. That feels too neat. Some of what we treat as social impact right now might be the next decade's biggest business. The buyer is not assembled yet. But buyers assemble. Markets emerge where there were none. Data tells us what the world is today. Builders bet on what it becomes.
That gap is where I get stuck, and where I get most excited. So I will leave you with two questions instead of an answer.
Which behavioral shift are you watching that nobody else is pricing in yet?
Which of today's "no buyer" problems do you think will quietly become the biggest businesses of the next decade?
If something comes to mind, I would love to hear it. Any pattern hiding in plain sight, any shift you think is about to happen, anything I got wrong.
Scores based on public market data (AHA, Thomson Reuters, IDC, Mordor Intelligence) and my own judgment. Directional, not definitive.
One tap. No account. Just let me know.
If you have a behavioral shift in mind, build a lens for it ↓
The three preset lenses see what the framework can see today. The Custom lens is for what it cannot. If you are watching a behavioral shift nobody is pricing in yet, this is where you weight it.