Too many markets...I want to go into all of them!

Someone recently asked me the following:

"If what you're developing can go in many different products, but you need a product to select a market, do the market research, diligence, and even look for partners with experience in that specific product space...what's a good way to go about that, and still keep yourself open to pivoting in the future?   For me, say you can go into the personal app space, or the healthcare transcription space, or the commercial IVR space, or license technology capabilities, or any number of others, the initial people I'd want to reach out to to bring on board or help are all different for each."

Good question.  Unfortunately, there's no easy, quick solution.  As soon as you have your core product somewhat defined, you (or someone from your team) should be doing a comprehensive market analysis, which looks at all possible markets.  For each market, one needs to assess the market size, how difficult is it to penetrate, what are the margins, how much does your solution benefit them, etc, etc.  Lots of work here!  If you're lucky, you can get a team of business students to do this, maybe even for free, but the timing has to be right w.r.t. their course series.  Or, you might be able to find a business student to do an independent study project, again, for free.  Other options exist as well.  But, before you do any of this, you must have a list of proposed product features to help you define potential markets.

Sometimes, an easy, low-hanging-fruit kind of market is obvious, and that's often a good starting point, even though it might not be a huge market or perhaps not a high-margin market, but it could potentially bring in some early revenue.