Part of navigating Entrepreneurship is finding underserved, or badly served, markets and creating a product or service that will solve or simplify a problem its experiencing. For those in the manufacturing and sourcing industry, these problems and solutions are often thought about in a physical way, ie – what tangible product can I sell in this market?

But what if we combined software with physical products into a seamless ecosystem geared towards solving these problems. Not just in an e-commerce sense, but in software as a servie (SaaS).

As we’ve seen in the last year, the growth in AI products has been tremendous with plenty of startups hoping to leverage the hype and enter new or established markets. AI has caused a lot of uncertainty and opened avenues for new comers to disrupt industries that have often been seen as old school and, dare I say, fossilized.

The education space is one such industry.

Entrepreneurs are aware of how hard it is to break into legacy industries, which is why many startups choose to address the fringe or edge cases within these larger markets – since a little bit of a lot, can still be a lot.

One startup we can examine is Preparoni.co, a test preparation platform with hopes of leveraging AI to enable students and professionals to prepare for exams from an elementary science quiz to passing the bar. The kicker is that they are also thinking of providing physical tests and documents to accompany their SaaS product offering – again to address edge cases where some students do better with a physical medium.

Despite the large number of education technology (edtech) companies in this space, choosing a specific niche and iterating on it has given Preparoni some great interest in their beta release, with a spokesman mentioning a growing list of 242 interested users willing to test their beta release, slated for October 15th, 2024.

As Entrepreneurs, this is just one example of how AI, tech, and physical products can be combined to address niche problems that may lead to commercial success.