
Ask HN: What problem is REALLY bugging you?  - hajrice
I'm looking to solve a problem that is really bugging you/your business. Really bugging you in the sense that you'd be comfortable paying for it.
======
nudge
Right question, wrong place.

Ask teachers, dentists, gardeners, councillors, vets (both the animal-doctor
and the ex-military kind), fish owners, fish eaters, mechanics, little old
ladies who don't know whether to trust their mechanic, landlords,
concierges...

You're more likely to get responses you would never even have considered.

Look at it this way. It is often said that the best teams / startups are
formed of people with different backgrounds, different thinking styles,
different worldviews. So you're not going to add much to yourself by asking
people (broadly speaking) similar to yourself. Find people totally unlike you.
Think of a business you've never even encountered. Does it suck to own a fast
food franchise and be totally at the mercy of the brand? Who knows? Maybe it
does. Maybe you can help a little. Is it tough to be a guitar teacher nowadays
when I can sort-of learn from youtube? I bet it does. Can you help them stand
out?

Ask your friends about their friends. Who do they know who is in a weird
business or industry you're unlikely to know anything about? Maybe they do
something hardly anyone knows anything about? I met someone who told me about
a friend of theirs who works as a food arranger. For photographing food for
cookbooks. She's not the photographer. Or the cook. She's just really good at
arranging the food. I had no idea that even existed as a job.

So step outside HN and the other places you might frequent online. You might
just be able to fix a problem no-one capable of fixing has ever even heard of.

~~~
ErrantX
Maybe. But don't forget that Hacker News types have problems that need solving
too.

Indeed if you solve one of _our_ problems then you have two big advantages:

a) a huge pool of tech-savvy seed users

b) A much higher likelihood of _useful_ feedback

c) I would suggest, also, much better chance of revenue generation

~~~
nudge
I really meant in addition to HN type problems.

But to respond to your 'advantages':

a) I probably agree with this, although people can be evangelists offline too
you know. It's just called word of mouth.

b) This is almost certainly wrong. You think people who aren't tech-savvy are
unqualified to define what they consider to be useful?

c) Back this up, taking into consideration the fact that you might be
competing with open source / a pool of equally or more talented developers who
could undercut you or do your product better.

~~~
ErrantX
>It's just called word of mouth.

Agreed, I've had some success with this in the past. However if you fix a
specific problem common to many people here (as opposed, say, specific to
Doctors) you can reach them instantly with one post. Your entire seed market
is one click away :)

> You think people who aren't tech-savvy are unqualified to define what they
> consider to be usefu

No, but there is a pre-established forum for feedback (i.e. here). If you post
an app here your going to get great feedback - if people are using your app I
argue the feeback will be better/more specific

The only difference with other types of users is not that they don't know what
they want but that a) they sometimes dont get what is possible/impossible and
more importantly b) have trouble communicating their needs to you (that's not
an unfixable problem Im sure)

> Back this up

This was probably something of a leap. However we often see people saying "I
would pay X if you gave me Y" - usually from the already successful
entrepreneur types. Im suggesting that people here are perhaps more likely to
see value/not begrudge payment for a useful service.

------
thomaspaine
I want a personal assistant for 5-10 hours a week. Not a virtual one because
most of the things I want done are in meat space. Stuff like filling out
forms, doing my laundry, waiting in line for me at the DMV, and dropping off
my netflix returns in the mail. It sounds petty, but I really hate running
errands and filling out forms. I'm considering hiring someone off craigslist.

~~~
rguzman
I've often wanted the same. The main problem seems to be that it is probably
hard to make a living as a personal assistant at the prices you and I are
willing to pay.

There is also the trust issue: would you really trust a stranger enough to do
sensitive things?

~~~
petercooper
_The main problem seems to be that it is probably hard to make a living as a
personal assistant at the prices you and I are willing to pay._

I'm not sure it's the actual rate of pay. I'd pay $20 an hour for these
services no problem, and that's far above minimum wage. The problem is I'd
ultimately be paying _far_ more to do all the paperwork, have this person
treated as an "employee", taxes, and red tape. If it was just handing cash to
someone "under the table" the rate isn't too prohibitive.

Labor laws hurt employees as much as they protect them.

~~~
rguzman
Good point!

Taking care of taxes and red-tape should be scalable, though, right? Meaning
that it should be possible for a company to set all that stuff up and then
contract out the people. A consultancy for personal assistants.

New question: is there enough demand and margin to make this worth it for a
company to do? Is there enough supply of people who want to be personal
assistants? My guesses would be no and yes, respectively.

------
Aegean
Here's what you _can't_ find among a plethora of web design consultancies, cms
systems, off-the-shelf website design services, html templates...

A small business/startup website solution that is compact, editable, live and
clearly describes the product and company.

No, its not vague or different every time. It should:

1) Clearly describe the product

2) Clearly describe the company and what it does.

3) Does not look mediocre. (E.g. those static html sites based on those usual
narrow rectangular templates with links at the side or top).

4) Easily changeable. (i.e. updates on parts of it without much html tweaking)

Extra:

5) An easy-to-update company blog, ability to upload multimedia content such
as embed product videos. A startup is changing quick, and so should the
website.

Do the first 4, I'll buy it. Then add 5.

Examples:

<http://www.rethinkdb.com/>

<http://pivotallabs.com/>

I have researched and both have spent considerable amount of time building
theirs, and they have all 5. Why not do it off the shelf?

~~~
ErrantX
I tried this a few years ago (for businesses). It never really worked out
because you have to _sell_ it to people.

In the end it filled with affiliate marketers (it seems it was useful for them
:P) so I had to scrap it.

------
roel_v
How ebooks that are distributed in pdf are so hard to read on small screens,
and the lack of properly working pdf->reflowable format (epub) tools. This is
a hard problem and I'd pay for a 80% solution. It would have to recognize and
properly fix/insert chapter titles, initial caps, tables of content, other
leader/footer material, ... It would have to properly insert images in a
sensible spot yet remove background images. Also it needs to properly
recognize and format paragraphs. Columns would be nice but those are in the
20% I can live without.

~~~
keefe
This task is on my TODO list. Why does <http://calibre-ebook.com/> fail?

~~~
roel_v
Because it is basically a glorified frontend (as far as pdf to other formats
conversion is concerned) for pdftohtml. It treats every line as a paragraph,
can't intelligently decide on what is a chapter heading etc. The problem I'm
describing is AI hard, it can't be done be some rule based matching. I know
that Calibre has some regex based rules for finding chapters etc. but that is
way too hard and only solves part of the problem, besides many book don't use
the 'Chapter 1: xxx' format anyway.

~~~
keefe
We may have different goals in mind... I have a bunch of PDFs I need to get to
my sony reader, for example academic papers. I want them to look basically OK,
which I don't "think" is an AI hard problem. Detecting any text that
represents a chapter certainly is... but I'm OK with writing regex to get my
data out. I'll be posting in the mobileread forums about this at some point in
the coming weeks if you're interested in whatever solution I hack out.

~~~
roel_v
Academic papers especially are a PITA, at least those formatted in columns, so
it depends on the journal I guess. Plus you need detection of paragraphs to
get line breaks at the proper locations. If it's not in columns and if you are
willing to tweak the algorithm parameters to each conversion (paper), then it
won't be that hard (just detect increased line spacing, or indented first
line), but a commercial application would have to work almost automatically.
or otherwise have a very quick feedback cycle (preview/edit settings/redo
conversion). That's another one of my gripes with Calibre, the epub/fb2
preview application is so so slow that it's almost unusable. Yeah let me know
if you find a working solution, although I do have dozens of hours worth of
scripts laying about to do custom conversions, so real one-off hackjobs I have
so many of that I don't need any more :)

------
tomh-
I would pay to outsource the risk of being a PayPal merchant. I want to be
able to serve my users with the option of paying with PayPal, but PayPal for
merchants is totally unreliable. Especially in the virtual good/currency
industry they seem to have the tendency to lock your account for no reasons at
all, and you can be without money for over 180 days.

~~~
mstevens
An obvious alternative is to pay to be with another payment service provider
who sucks less.

~~~
tomh-
Unfortunately thats not an option, if you don't offer paypal, it will cost you
users..

~~~
mstevens
I was cheating a little, clearly a payment provider who sucks less will be
just as popular with users as paypal, or they wouldn't suck less!

~~~
pbhjpbhj
"Better the devil you know... " or so the aphorism goes.

We've a burger kiosk very close to and far better than McDonalds (IMO) but
everyone still goes to McDonalds. Brand loyalty, advertising, etc..

------
mstevens
Another problem I'd be very tempted to pay money to solve right now:

I'm taking lessons in French. It's pretty cool. I'd like to find ways to
improve my French at home. I'd love a site that would make it easy to find
someone to video chat with eg skype with some (possibly minimal) teaching
skills so I could practice conversation.

~~~
laxk
You can try to use <http://www.language-exchanges.org/> This is what you're
talking about.

~~~
mstevens
Thanks, that looks worth a closer look.

------
nosse
I would need a decent 2D CAD for linux. 3D even sweeter. problem is that dudes
who usually code and dudes who usually draw with CAD are two totally different
breeds. And that's why we don't allready have a good CAD for linux.

I would be possibly willing to pay 200eur for a copy(but I want to see a
proper demo first), and I don't think I'm alone.

And I don't need anything fancy like Autodesk's "AutoCAD revit architechture
visual suite", just basic "draw lines and circles" kind of functionality.

~~~
froo
You can do CAD in blender.

[http://www.blender3darchitect.com/2009/07/blender-3d-as-a-
ca...](http://www.blender3darchitect.com/2009/07/blender-3d-as-a-cad-tool-
using-the-procad-script/)

------
1Place
I need a software solution to model best legal outcomes and other options for
people to help become aware of their options: (i) If law is based on Acts of
Parliament which are written in a tree structure; (ii) Then Information can be
placed into software complying with the tree structure in (i), so we can
dynamically model the outcomes possible? Else (iii) Information is missing to
complete the modelling of outcomes. What information is missing?

This would aid with the understanding of the law and clients/individuals would
be more knowledgeable and prepared for the options available.

My preference would be in the area of IP law such as copyright, patents,
trademarks etc since we can model these areas of law more easily with yes/know
answers.

I place this need on my blog recently: <http://1place.com.au/wptest.php>

------
roundsquare
The fact that people vote for their leaders based on superficial stupidity and
not based on issues.

~~~
limist
"Ain't we got all the fools on our side? and ain't that a majority in any
town?" - Twain

------
maxklein
I have all this data that I collect and it's very difficult to make sense of
it or to break it down into a form that tells me what steps I should be taking
next to improve my bottom line.

~~~
mstevens
We have similar problems. For example, I'm fairly certain some sort of
bayesian model could tell me valuable things about my data. Someone who could
run with that provide me an automated way to extract probabilities of
desirable outcomes from my data would get money very quickly.

~~~
mnemonicsloth
It's kind of hard to put Bayesian Data Analysis into boxes and sell it :-)

Even so, email me if you want to talk about it.

You too, Max.

------
Tichy
How to make money, or rather, how to survive and support a family.

------
jcnnghm
Quickbooks. Quickbooks is the single worst piece of software that I have ever
had to deal with on a regular basis. I want to be able to reliably pull in all
the financial transactions that occur for my company, and categorize them as
quickly as possible. Quickbooks does this, but it fails on the reliably, all,
and quickly aspects.

I also need to be able to import invoicing information from my billing
software, and match that to bank deposits and credit card settlements.

~~~
JayNeely
Are you looking for something different than <http://www.mint.com> ?

~~~
jcnnghm
I'm not interested in personal finance. I'm interested in business finance.

------
mstevens
Something I was looking for recently (slightly UK specific).

I like to buy FSF-level free hardware and software - ie no binary blobs, free
software bios if you can get it, no binary only video drivers.

I couldn't find a store clearly focussed on selling this to me in the UK.
Existing linux related online vendors often provide software that requires
binary drivers, and don't clearly indicate the details of this sort of thing.

Existing stores like kd85.com are in the direction of what I'm thinking of.

------
Hume
I don't have a business, just an office drone; but I have to find out about
legal ownership of companies all the time, when our customers issue purchase
orders we have to make sure that the names on the invoices we generate match
them.

Changing the names in our CRM/ERP systems is a laborious process and we have
to get the customer to sign legal documents confirming that all the software
licenses owned by the previous company are now owned by the acquirer/new
merger.

I think that a website containing all the name change documents, press
releases and possibly a service that tracks legal ownership (though this could
be hard to scale) could be worth pursuing, along the lines of a Duns and
Bradstreet ( <http://www.dnb.com> ) type company.

It could be something like a more focused docstoc or perhaps a legal wolfram
alpha.

------
clintavo
I need a way to add a simple white label site search feature for my customers.
We run a service that hosts thousands of websites. We would like a service
with an api that allows to have a site indexed and add a search box. Sort of
like a google custom search engine but all with api access for each site. We
looked a Lijit, but they don't allow searches without advertising (our
customers don't want that). And with all that my team has their plate we
really don't want to try to run our own search (ala Solr) ourselves.

------
mstevens
Thought from last night - we need a HN "problem registry".

Not that new software ideas are hard to come by, but it'd be interesting to
build up a list of specific pain points with eg) email.

~~~
wlievens
There's a google spreadsheet somewhere that circulated a few weeks ago.

~~~
mstevens
Can't find it on a quick look at searchyc, do you remember any more details?

~~~
limist
I think this is what you're referring to:
[http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag-
R_ZlGO21NdE9HSWRk...](http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag-
R_ZlGO21NdE9HSWRkbjNyUGRxS2JIV3NxYVdiaXc&hl=en)

------
froo
I know this might sound odd, but I'd like a "privacy policy" and "terms and
conditions" generator that doesn't suck.

I'd be willing to part with cash for something where I just tick off the
various things I want and it would generate those documents for my site.

Better yet, it would be nice if it was able to make these documents be
localised to be legal in whatever jurisdiction (of my choosing) at creation
time.

------
tomh-
I would like a linux distro which runs photoshop, as good as windows with
equal performance, out of the box

~~~
keefe
I don't think this will happen, because of : 1) create user X 2) sux X 3)
Install PhotoShop Trial 4) In 30 days, GoTo 1

Yes, I learned programming with GoTo. I am old.

------
netcan
Teeth.

~~~
mstevens
Many existing suppliers are available.

------
ig1
Better online take-away service, I used justeat at the moment but it leaves a
lot to be desired (have to enter credit card everytime, lack of details, poor
search, food reviews, etc.)

Instant online quotes/price comparison for taxi services

------
zackattack
Why is your target demographic HN users?

Try to maximize # of customers * $ revenue per customer

