

Ask HN:What's the biggest problem in your business that software can solve? - danielksa

Fellow Entrepreneurs, 
Hope things are amazing with all of you guys:)
 My name is Daniel and i&#x27;m a coder looking to help businesses with the challenges they have and i was wondering what the biggest problem in your business is that can be solved by software.How do you tackle it? I would appreciate any kind of info or advice and would indeed do my best to help you) With best regards, Daniel K.W.
======
mbrownnyc
From what I've seen, and once being a systems consultant, and now being
embedded in an old client, I can say you really need to have exposure to
business to answer that question yourself. The most successful solutions I've
seen are created by a person or (even better) a large group of people who come
from an industry and already have groundwork expertise in that industry. You
can "grab the ear" of an embedded experienced person, but then why would
business owners, C-level execs, VPs, or engineers not just create the solution
themselves? (aim to become one of those people)

Here are a few generic super-saturated software solutions I've seen: \- Issue
tracker: anything from helpdesk, to facilities management, to bug tracking, to
project management and everything in between. \- Accounting software: Yes.
Accounts payable, accounts receivable. \- Stock tracking: I'm a vendor, I'm a
distributor, I'm an end user... all still relevant to me! (integrate into the
other stuff, for sure!). CRM would fall into this, if you're crafty with your
nouns.

l0gicpath already expressed the value of a thread like this, I doubt you will
get specific answers to your specific question. Humbly, I believe your best
bet is to connect with people involved in businesses (in real life), try to
focus on an industry, and see what's needed there.

I've been working with this client for almost five years, and I can say I have
several ideas of what's needed for them. But as with l0gicpath, I can't share
them...

Here's a magic path: 1) Start focusing on a thing you like doing: coding,
working on cars, painting, a trade, furniture design, music, ceramics,
clothes... (sorry I'm looking around my room)... 2) Start working harder on
that until you understand business operations a bit more. 3) Find a niche that
needs filling and fill it. 4) ??? 5) Profit.

I'm on step 2 and have been working for nine years generally in two
industries. Many people don't have the motivation to move passed step 2, or
arguably never even complete step 1 (just live a mundane life collecting a
paycheck in something they don't actually enjoy). Some people are able to
bypass step 2-3 by riding on other peoples' coat tails (like working for a
company that does this thing). Then they expand just beyond what the company
does, sort of like: [http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-
pictures/](http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/) and
blammo... you've got a business.

Here's a trivial example of the magic path... I just remembered an ad on the
NYC subway about a dude who graduated from Monroe College in The Bronx and
opened a dry cleaner: [http://www.norwoodnews.org/id=11530&story=monroe-
graduate-op...](http://www.norwoodnews.org/id=11530&story=monroe-graduate-
opens-dry-cleaner-in-front-of-alma-mater/)
[http://www.stopanddropcleaners.com/v1/](http://www.stopanddropcleaners.com/v1/)

He saw a pretty saturated niche service, used some business-analysis stuff to
figure out where to put the service, filled it, and now he's running a
successful business. If he has the business acumen, his business will grow,
and he will make more money. He will spend it on himself, or on his kids
education, and he will start the long line of Jimenezes, successful dry
cleaners.

Tom Cat Bakery, Shake Shake, Dewalt, Seguso glass, github, Google... they all
started somewhere and provided something to some clients. They all had
motivation, controlled risk, and had some insight into their customers' needs
and wants.

You can do the same with hard work, perseverance and motivation! I've followed
you on github and look forward to seeing what you produce!

------
l0gicpath
Quite a few in particular that come to my mind but for various reasons I'm
neither inclined to share nor my team can't resolve so I'm just writing to say
cheers to you.

I checked your profile, you are quite young. A small tip, might want to point
out to a few things you've done. Maybe small side projects, weekend hacks or
any open source contributions just to add some context to your post.

> I'm a coder looking to help businesses with the challenges they have

With your age and little experience, that statement doesn't project much.

All the Best and keep pushing forward.

~~~
danielksa
Hey,thanks i get that. But still,i'm just searching for an idea,for pain that
businesses have,guess there is no problem if people can share problems they
have...

~~~
throwmeaway2525
Don't let anybody discourage you--that's most important. Just do stuff.

It isn't hard to find examples of young millionaires and billionaires in this
industry.

------
tobinharris
I run a < 10 man company. Still looking for Nirvana with...

1\. What is my balance if I shut the business down today and paid off all
creditors and pulled in all debts? What does the business look like if I hire
someone new? I need financial planning and forecasting that goes way beyond
excel. Which is lighting fast to work with.

2\. Where are my projects really at? I'm a service business. I have to sell
our deliverables. Need agile planning, rich documentation and project costing.
The bastard child of Google Docs, Excel and Pivotal Tracker.

------
alex_hitchins
Sounds like you need a 'Problem Exchange' site. In all seriousness, this could
be a valuable way to aggregate pain points, get community feedback and see how
much impact the solution could bring. Also, if lots of small organisations are
suffering the same issues, there could be the option for crowd funding the
work.

Maybe something like this already out there, if someone knows then please let
me know!

~~~
benp84
This is a great idea. You should build it!

------
wanghq
Check below ideas shared in another HN post. Even you can't work on those
ideas, you might be able to learn how he finds/describes his ideas.

[http://thedannorris.com/startup-ideas/](http://thedannorris.com/startup-
ideas/)

------
bmelton
To expound a little bit on l0gicpath's question, really, we need more to go
on.

In my experience, finding a random problem is only a small part of the battle.
What kind of customer do you want? The problems at Fortune 50 companies are
very different to the problems of 20-man shops. 37Signals made their mark on
the world by recognizing that, and by focusing on the latter.

They were able to do this, probably, because that was the size of their own
company, and they were likely scratching their own itch. That gave them
insight into what they needed, and the problems they had, which gave them a
bit of experience that they never would have had otherwise.

So, what kind of customer do you want? There aren't very many good solutions
for 360 feedback, but the target market for those kinds of products are
enterprise customers, and they're painfully hard to sell to.

What kind of problems can you solve? If I told you that we had problems
calibrating our nuclear cooling systems, is that something you can solve? Is
that a problem you can even approach?

These things matter, really, and it's hard to just spit out problems at random
without knowing the kind of problems you're looking for. On top of that,
there's very little practicality to someone trying to solve a problem that
they don't experience themselves... or, at least, it rarely works.

~~~
danielksa
Hey,thanks for your comment:) I'm talking mostly about small-size
businesses.I've already made a similar post on Reddit and got a whole list of
problems that small-size companies have:) But yeah,i see you're absolutely
right and i realize i should have been more concrete...

~~~
bmelton
Word. I'm not trying to not be helpful or anything... but I work at a tech
company, so for the most part, all the problems that we've identified, we've
either found solutions for or built solutions for. I can think of very little
in my immediate knowledge that could be considered a problem that I think
could be solved.

In the absence of a problem, I thought I'd try to be helpful by helping you
help me more.

What are you own areas of expertise? I know a local company that's making a
few million a year by building an accounting, inventory management, estimation
solution that's targeted to landscaping companies. They know the market, and
basically built the 'Basecamp-sized' alternative to the million dollar
solutions that only exist for very large companies. Generally, even very large
landscaping companies (which are their target market) aren't making enough
money to move to an SAP-caliber solution and hire a team of developers and
engineers to run / administer it.

The ideal problem for you to solve is something that you have enough expertise
in that you could identify with the pain point and be able to execute well.
Either way, good luck in finding something and nailing it.

Care to link to the reddit discussion?

~~~
danielksa
[http://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/1q128m/whats_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/1q128m/whats_the_biggest_challenge_in_your_businesshow/)
I also found a bunch of other promising ideas on reddit that are not that
technically difficult to implement... Just have to validate them completely
and then build&market:)

