Every opportunity exists on a spectrum from easy to difficult. At the easy end: crowded, well-understood, competitive markets with established players, clear pricing benchmarks and thin margins. At the difficult end: regulatory complexity, technical challenges, uncertain timelines, capital requirements and the discomfort of genuine uncertainty.
Most people congregate at the easy end. Competition is fierce there precisely because the path is clear. The difficult end has almost nobody on it — not because the opportunities are less valuable, but because the difficulty filters out everyone who is unwilling to deal with it.
Every significant venture I have built has been at the difficult end of the spectrum. Medical devices require TGA registration. Migration services involve complex regulatory compliance. Agricultural biotech requires years of development and deep scientific knowledge. None of these paths were easy. All of them had less competition than simpler markets would have had.
The difficulty is not a bug. It is the mechanism that produces the opportunity. If registration were easy and fast, everyone would have had a COVID test kit on the market in weeks. The regulatory barrier was what made the market available to the small number of operators willing to navigate it.
This does not mean choose hard things for their own sake. Difficulty for its own sake is masochism. The right frame is: where is there genuine value available, and what is it that keeps most people from accessing it? If the barrier is difficulty — regulatory, technical, capital, complexity — and you are willing to engage with that difficulty, you will find the space less crowded than you expected.
The profound insight is that the path of least resistance leads to maximum competition. The path of most resistance leads to minimum competition. Choose your obstacles deliberately. The obstacle is also the filter. Anything that would stop most people from attempting a market is something that, if you can navigate it, leaves you with a much smaller competitive field on the other side.