

Ask HN: What's your problem? - kez

In the spirit of identifying niches that HNers could develop products and services around, I'd like to ask what your problems are.<p>I'm guessing the majority of readers here are not self-employed or actively working on startups, and most niche-identifying-problems stem from the work place.  I'll start...<p>I want to be able to scribe meeting notes and have them recorded digitally for circulation to colleagues and CRM systems.  This could take the form of a printed note-taking template, where by OCR could determine different sections (attendees, date, actions, notes) when scanning them in.  It is not good etiquette (here) to scribe notes on a laptop during a meeting, and typing them up by hand is very time consuming.<p>What are your problems?
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cousin_it
My problems? Okay, I'll try to list them honestly. Try to build some startups
from this:

1) It's too cold in Moscow. The gray sky sucks.

2) I fall sick easily. Now slowly recovering from a brutal case of stomatitis.

3) I can't easily find new people to play music together in a casual setting.
I'd do this every couple days if it were simple.

4) Whenever I have >1 concurrent girlfriend, I have trouble separating them.
Shutting off the phone sucks. Three girls at once give me so many worries that
I wonder why I even bother.

5) Getting visas to foreign countries sucks, and air tickets are too
expensive. Okay I can live with the ticket prices - my salary is high enough -
but the visa humiliations are too much for me. You Americans have no idea.

6) The Flash platform is really poorly documented around the edges. I'd love
to see something like quirksmode.org for Flash.

7) I can't seem to wake up early.

~~~
dabent
"Three girl(friends)s at once..."

This is a problem? :-) There are actually several web applications to help
people get into that sort of situation.

Seriously, doesn't caller ID help this situation? Maybe you could convince
them all to download a location-based app so you can track them and see when
two are headed to your apartment at the same time.

~~~
krakensden
If they find out, it most certainly is a problem.

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arihelgason
Problems faced by the denizens of this site are more likely to be well-served
by what already exists.

Try asking people in industries that rarely interface with the tech world.
That's where you find the big, underserved problems.

~~~
olalonde
Which industries would that be? What is a good way to get in touch with them
without looking too opportunist or ruining yourself? (genuine question)

~~~
megamark16
Go work in them.

Most of us could probably spend a single day in the office of a company in a
different industry and pick out a handful of ideas on ways they could improve
their processes, or speedup tasks, or cutout waste. Not all of those ideas
will require a technology-based solution, but surely a few of them will.

If you really want to find good problems to solve, try working as a temp for a
few weeks. Ask lots of questions and make notes, I'm sure you'll find plenty
of work to do.

Maybe that's a good startup idea right there; build a site where businesses
can post their problems, procedures, workflows, painpoints, etc, and
professionals can comment on them, offer suggestions, either using existing
solutions (technical or not), or try to make business connections ("we can
build that for you").

~~~
mfalcon
'Maybe that's a good startup idea right there; build a site where businesses
can post their problems, procedures, workflows, painpoints, etc, and
professionals can comment on them, offer suggestions, either using existing
solutions (technical or not), or try to make business connections ("we can
build that for you").'

I think it's a good idea but don't you think most businesses would be
reluctant to show their problems to the web world?

~~~
lhuang
Plus I think you would be inundated with a bunch of unique one-off problems
that while technically could be solved/improved via a tech solution, lacks the
footprint to make it worth anyone's time.

------
tdoggette
Certain large, critical organizations that I work with have a paperwork
process that goes:

1) Receive information through web form or email

2) Print it out

3) Scan it in to document management system.

There are whole offices of people whose job it is to do this.

~~~
GFischer
Hey there, you're stealing my idea :P

Actually, that one is a good one.

I'll add my own problem: paperwork. The organization I work for has lots of
seemingly useless paperwork, but it cannot be automated because of the legal
requirements - we NEED to have paper signatures of customers' contracts.

That said, we're looking into minimizing it as much as possible - if only
there was a widely recognized and legally accepted electronic equivalent to
the signature, we could automate most of the process :(

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drcode
I want to program the iPhone/iPad, but don't want all the headaches required
for this:

    
    
       - Buying a Mac dev box
       - Learning Objective C
       - Dealing with the whole Apple Developer's Program paper shuffle

~~~
scorchin
I'm going through the same process right now.

I've just bought a Mac Mini + Magic Mouse + VGA Adapter + AppleCare for £700.
I've got a decent monitor, KVM switch and keyboard already.

I'm going over my K&R book at the moment, running through all of the exercises
— especially pointers.

Once I've finishes with K&R my plan is to go through 'Cocoa Programming for
Mac OS X' by Hillegass. Aiming for a completion date around the end of March.
After that my iPhone development begins as I should have a decent foothold
over core Mac programming and will, hopefully, only need to fill in a few
blanks using the online references.

------
mstevens
I have a big procrastination problem. An effective tool/strategy/app for
reducing this procrastination could be massively useful to me.

~~~
vorador
This is a part of the problem. You are not going to see an improvement if you
don't face your problem. Stop seeking an escape strategy and come to grips
with procrastination.

------
ARR
My problem is time. I am still a student in India where you have one exams
after another and all on completely different levels. I want to do what I love
with programming and be part of projects which interest me, whose products I
use (best example would be Ubuntu), but I know if I start, I will only be able
to do it for a couple of weeks and then its back to studying something totally
unrelated. This on and off sessions keeps me totally out of shape for
programming as I am not able to get good practice. I eagerly wait for the day
when I am free to do what I love indefinitely.

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fragmede
Make this use case easier, or just parts of it; for all critical IT
infrastructure that isn't core to my business:

I'm looking for a wiki program to run. I want to force people to login before
they can read any of the wiki (it's for internal use). It also needs to
support LDAP.

Currently, I load up Wikipedia and find their table
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software>). I can then take
that table and import it directly into a Google Spreadsheet, which lets me do
better filtering. Hopefully the table on Wikipedia has the fields for the
comparison I want. If not, I have to go and fill out the list myself (and then
add it to Wikipedia). I then spend the next few days playing around with the
short list until I'm satisfied with my choice; then implement.

Thats all well and good. But I'm not the IT department! Okay, as a startup, I
am, but it isn't core to my business. And I feel like it has got to be a
solved problem. How about for inventory tracking? A trouble ticket system?
Etc.

This shouldn't be that difficult.

Asking people what they use certainly helps, but they may or may not have the
same requirements.

As an app, a better way to use tables on Wikipedia would be great (especially
when things are split across multiple tables as the list of wiki software is).

(I'm not affiliated, but while writing up my use case, I came across this:
<http://www.wikimatrix.org> )

------
mstevens
I know this is in some ways a claim to be smarter than google, but I always
feel like email clients just aren't up to it.

I have some fuzzy ideas on better webmail I plan to experiment with one day.

~~~
scorchin
You're not the only one: <http://inessential.com/2010/01/16/email_init>

Looks as though the project is going to be called 'Letters App' and the
president is John Gruber.

~~~
mstevens
Interesting. Looks more mac specific than I was thinking.

My musings on interesting areas:

* I don't care about IMAP/POP/all that stuff. Mail comes in via SMTP, goes out via SMTP.

* Messages go straight into postgres

* There's gold in them thar messages headers - there's a lot of structure hidden in there that gets ignored, it must be possible to do _something_ interesting.

* GTD motivated one-message-at-a-time, file/reply/mark to reply later.

* There must be something interesting you can do with automatic email classification.

* Only client is webmail.

* Unashamed focus on people who need to manage 500 messages a day.

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bmelton
Failure to finish. I've had, to date, 7 ideas that, had I finished executing,
I would have been first to market (in most cases, by years). I would have been
beaten to market on one other product, and really close to tied with another
few.

In imaginary-land, where I live, of the 7 companies I beat to market, 4 of
them had million dollar + exits or acquisitions, so I COULD have been worth
45-55 million, give or take.

My number one challenge in doing anything is not having somebody else to
motivate me, or even just tell me what to do. With almost everything I do, I
solve the challenges first; the bits that otherwise make the product, or the
bits that aren't obviously going to work... once I've built those out, the
project is mentally done for me.

I will often fail to do the little things, the EASY things even, like building
the change password page, or sending an email for account creation, etc. I'm
so bad at it, even, that I will often stop after I have figured out HOW to
solve the problems, without ever even bothering to actually implement.

So yeah, that's why I'm stuck with my 9-to-5. Good question.

~~~
prawn
You have just described me too... Countless ideas started and very few
completed or even got to a launchable status. I know exactly what's required
in every case but struggle to wrap things up.

Funnily enough, I think I'd make a solid startup/side-project coach and it's
exactly what I need, also. Would love to see a small group work together to
motivate each other, like an online version of the YC dinners (going by what
I've read of them on here).

~~~
mmelin
I have the same problem. I find it difficult to keep up the motivation to do
the boring work that makes the difference between cool side project and actual
product. I think this in large part is because I do things alone, because I
don't have a problem with day-to-day drudgery in my day job.

Of course, I wouldn't be fiddling around with new product ideas if I was
satisfied with the day job either.

I'd definitely be into the small group idea - it would have to be quite a bit
smaller and non-public than HN though :-)

~~~
jiaaro
I'd also be interested in something like that.

maybe we need to make a new website? ;)

~~~
bmelton
Hopefully none of the participants of this thread take on the task. ;-)

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Zarkonnen
Thanks to a habit of bad posture I'm very limited in how much work I can do.
But terse code is often incomprehensible and English can't be compressed too
much either. I want a way to reliably code/write without using my hands,
and/or to minimise the number of input gestures I need to do.

------
olalonde
I am bilingual (french/english), but one thing really bothers me: I never get
to speak in English. I read books in English, I watch movies in English, I
read/write in English, etc. but I never get the chance to practice my _spoken_
English. The end result is that although I understand/write English very well,
I lack confidence when talking. I wish I could _talk_ on the net so that I
"get" the accent and intonation. The best scenario would be to be able to
discuss about things I'm interested in at the same time (startups,
programming, etc.). I could actually host a Ventrilo server (anyone
interested?) until someone builds an app for that :D

~~~
gregg_
I would highly recommend playing online video games with voice chat. With
almost any game you choose, you'll find a mature group of individuals that
play casually and would enjoy chatting with you.

~~~
olalonde
That's what I used to do actually. It was indeed a very effective way to speak
English but I pretty much lost interest in video games now.

------
csomar
I want to read a Jquery book... I didn't succeed yet, I'm building a $20K
project with that thing called Jquery, but it seems that I need to read
something like 500 pages before being able to parse the DOM with ease.

I need to read it quickly, the project need to be complete within 1 month...
or I'LL DIE :'( :'(

------
knv
I need a web based wiki/concept-map hybrid.

------
clistctrl
Personally, I have no significant problems that can be solved with technology.

However if you look around, there are far better places to go looking to solve
problems then HN. The recession is plush with opportunity. Not just
opportunity to help someone with some insignificant problem, but to truly help
someone live better. Personally, I am doing pretty well but when i go back to
the place where I grew up everywhere I look I see unemployment especially in
young people in their 20's. I've spent a great deal of thought towards
analyzing why this is. I've come to many conclusions, but in the end I think
its an education system that prepared a large body of students for work in
industry that was lifted up and handed to computers. So now there is at least
one town (and I would imagine there are more) where there are young people
eager to find a job. I feel like the internet is a great solution, the local
economy may be devastated but the global economy probably still has something
for them. Sites like etsy are one step towards this direction. I think if you
can find something more specialized, with the principle of self employment.
you have something special.

