Entrepreneurship is often associated with risk -taking, resilience, execution. These are necessary qualities. But they are not enough. What distinguishes the founders who transform a sector of those who occupy it for a time is not discipline or luck. It is the ability to identify a truth that others do not yet see. A counter-current truth, buried under habits, conventions or collective reasoning, a hidden truth.
What the market believes is not always true
Innovation often starts where The market is wrong. Where the dominant opinion says that a problem is solved, that a segment is saturated, that a model is impossible.
-
- It is too late to create a neobank.
- The restaurateurs will never buy a robot.
- The HR market is too fragmented.
- No one will pay for a meditation app.
And yet, in each of these supposedly locked spaces, companies prospered by relying on a truth that the rest of the market had not yet formulated.
The hidden truth is often simple-but radically underestimated
A good founder does not look for a brilliant idea. He is looking for Udoes not dissonance between reality and the perception that we have. It identifies areas where the market sees inertia, where it perceives a flaw. He does not guess the future, he sees the present with a little more lucidity than the others.
Innovation is not born from pure intuition.
She is born from a Precisely hypothesis on what everyone ignores, underestimates or refuses to see.
It is often trivial in appearance:
-
- that freelancers want to be paid instantly;
- that patients do not want to call a cabinet to make an appointment;
- that farmers do not have access to an effective power plant.
But the simplicity of an idea says nothing about its power.
What matters is the sharpness of the conviction and the precision of the execution.
How to spot a hidden truth?
This is neither creative ideation nor market analysis. This is a regastrategic RD exercised.
Some useful signs:
-
- You observe a recurring, poorly served behavior, which everyone considers marginal.
- You notice a use that bypassing existing tools, without anyone interested.
- You detect an inconsistency between what the actors say and what they really do.
- You feel that a system is due only by inertia, without durable operational logic.
- You personally know a dead angle in the sector, ignored by large platforms or investors.
This is where the right project is born.
Concrete examples of hidden truth that has become a business foundation
-
- Alan started with a simple observation: the mutual health insurance in France did not have a native digital product, despite favorable legislation.
- Qonto Built on the idea that VSEs-PMEs had specific banking needs, ignored by traditional banks.
- Pennylane saw that the dialogue between accountants and managers still went through manual Excel files.
- Lydia was born out of forgotten obviousness: with friends, sending money must be as simple as a message.
In each case, the idea was not spectacular. It was strategic, and the founders saw what others had normalized.
What the market ignores is your opportunity.
Being an entrepreneur is not aligning features on a roadmap. It is to start from a hidden truth and extract a clear, precise value proposition, difficult to ignore. The best founders do not ask the question: “What if I launched an app?” They start with: “What does everyone believe… and who may be wrong?” It is these differences, between dominant belief and operational reality, which form the real field of innovation.
