
Ask HN: It’s 2018, what to build now? - ryeguy_24
Enough is enough. It’s now 2018 and I’ve spent months trying to come up with good side business&#x2F;product ideas and have hit an analysis paralysis point with no good ideas. I’d like to focus on small business problems but just can’t seem to find any.  I’ve emailed businesses, scoured the web and am having little luck. My last product was a hypothesis that never gained traction so I’m now extra cautious (maybe too much) about jumping into any new unvalidated ideas.<p>Any entrepreneurial advice on how to get out of this funk? And also any advice&#x2F;approaches on how to identify a good idea?
======
stfwn
Speaking as an anthropologist: go into the field. I bet very few great ideas
came from behind a desk. Ask people with jobs you don’t know much about simple
questions that are _not_ directly aimed at finding out what you can sell them.
Be genuinely interested in their day.

“What do you do first when you get to work?”, “Do you dress a certain way?”,
“Do you eat with co-workers or alone?”, “Do you like to go outside during the
day?”, “What are your thoughts on <habit x/y/z>?”.

It surprises me time and time again how deep a seemingly simple line of work
turns out to be, and how many simple things are in a complex job. If you ask
many questions, something that you have good thoughts about on is bound to pop
up.

~~~
riazrizvi
Also you could go into the field at different levels, right? Level 1: by
canvassing random businesses asking about problems. Level 2: by attending
conferences where business owners are open to discovering new solutions. Level
3: by crawling business forums where owners discuss specific problems they
have. Level 4: by crawling reviews for solutions where business owners
complain about specific problems they have with existing solutions.

~~~
stfwn
I would try not to focus on ‘discovering problems’ when ‘going into the
field’. Consider what you will get if you ask directly what someone's problems
are: only the stuff everyone knows about and no one has solved in 200 years
since the industrial revolution, ± 60 years since the first computers and ± 30
years since the commercialisation of the internet. They probably haven't been
solved because there's some horrifying ROI maximalisation scheme behind it
that you cannot beat, or solving the problem is terrible ROI for yourself.

Going into the field anthropology-style means participatory observation; you
join those that you are researching in whatever they are doing. You try to
_experience_ their world and uncover their interpretation of it. You make an
honest attempt to blend in and _almost_ become of them.

And then you don't become one of them, because your being-different enables
you to identify opportunities that others in that field cannot. And that is
the stuff great ideas are made of.

------
techcode
I was something like 10 when I had my first business idea - "I'll do
library/rentals for comic-books \o/"!!!

My room window was just above neon sign for video/movies rental shop (VHS
stuff - where I'm from it was called "Video Klub"). And naturally I used
paper, scissors & glue to make my own sign to hang from my window as of course
I wanted to "tap into" people looking at VHS-shop neon sign...

And let me tell you - business was doing awesome ... Until one day an older
neighbor (like a grandpa) asked my parents what's up with sign hanging from
one of our windows saying "Strip Klub"?!? (context:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_strip](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_strip))

And in the ~25 years since then - I've had plenty of those "not the brightest
idea". However over time, most of them these days are good, though almost all
are either a bit too late or too early, so I didn't quite yet come up with
million bucks idea...

I still keep trying - and it's the combination of knowing two things:

1) The only reason everyone can walk (that is able to physically) is because
they kept trying until they did it!

2) On your death bed - only things you'll regret, are the things you wish you
tried but didn't ...

Keep trying!

------
ThomPete
Don't come up with ideas. Finds problems.

[https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-
problems-4...](https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-
problems-47ee63bb3511)

------
thisisit
You know people say - never be afraid of discussing your ideas? I believe one
of the reasons for that is everyone's vision is different. So, even if I gave
you an idea, I might see things differently than you do.

That said, here's my advice on finding a good idea - sell shovels during a
gold rush. Now what it means find places where you can provide value by
connecting two different parts of society.

One of the ways you do this is by building a robust "Customer Acquisition
Strategy" for X business.

People had spare bed/couch at home but no way to find customers. Answer -
Airbnb. The platform is so robust now that even full time B&B are using it for
their customer acquisition.

People wanted to earn some money using their cars, especially in cities. But
they had no way to connect with people wanting a ride. Answer - Uber.

Restaurants were spending tons on advertising but not getting steady stream of
customers. If they wanted to provide "home delivery" it was an additional
burden of maintaining a delivery fleet. Answer - Uber Eats, Grubhub, Postmates
etc. Even review sites like Yelp etc are part of customer acquisition strategy
as not only helps in great advertising when people see 4-4.5/5 rating but also
assuage concerns on food quality.

So find a niche where people still have this pain and you might have a unicorn
on your hands.

~~~
ThomPete
All of these businesses share one common theme.

They are all aggregators.

~~~
Shorn
Recent non-aggregator examples for the "cloud" gold-rush: Docker and Hashicorp
(Terraform especially).

I reckon there's plently of money left on the table for cloud-shovels (though
the market is getting fuller by the second).

Though of course, as pointed out in a different comment - you'll need some
experience with the problem-space in order to figure out what problem to
tackle.

------
zitterbewegung
Copy a startup that got acquired last year.

Try using
[https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

Or searching HN.

~~~
Buttons840
Companies that went under are a source of good ideas too. Many of them failed
because they accepted too much funding and thus lost the option of being a
modest success, but for a small team of one or two people, you can possibly
make the idea work and be profitable.

~~~
zitterbewegung
Why waste your time on failures when you have successes that already have
customers waiting for you to get your money .

~~~
ThomPete
Because it might as well be a timing or a strategy issue.

------
anigbrowl
Can I suggest instead:

Pick a market - no point in building things for people who don't have the
ability or will to pay for them

Join their community - make like you're interested in getting licensed or
participating. Look around for forums, almost every specialty field of hobby
or business has online forums and they're generally easy to get into.

Pay attention to what people complain about and which problems come up
repeatedly. You can ask people who are complaining to explain what their
issues are and they'll often be happy to tell you. An even better way to
gather information is dispute the basis for the complaint, insisting that The
Problem isn't a big deal - as a newbie on the forum this will usually inspire
someone to put you in your place with a detailed rebuttal that they might not
otherwise have bothered to spell out for you.

------
internetxplorer
A few Ideas I want someone to work on:

\- Code/Product Documentation SaaS tool for early stage tech companies (very
few good products, one is ReadMe.io)

\- An ad network for progressive web apps (PWA have good future and as of now
there is no exclusive ad network for them)

\- CRM kind of SaaS app for startup founders (where founders can manage all
their relationship, communication and contacts like investors, journalists,
team, power users, etc.)

You wanted B2B so I shared those. I have a few B2C ideas as well in case you'd
like to explore them as well. Hope it was helpful.

~~~
dbbk
What is ReadMe.io missing that you'd like to see?

~~~
internetxplorer
It looks like a well built product. Its just there should be more products and
alternatives in every niche.

I'd personally like to see a simpler version that offers a free plan too which
students can use. Just like how many B2B and developer targeted SaaS apps
offer a free plan that has some limitations but help people to get started.

Students globally are not documenting their code, projects and startups
because there is no simple and more importantly free/cheap alternative that
they are aware of.

Readme.io is pricey and is simply beyond the reach of students and developers
of developing/underdeveloped countries.

Their is no Readme.io like SaaS app for small and budget-sensitive projects as
far as I know.

------
vemv
1.- If you are in the right mindset, ideas will come effortlessly. Read
articles, work with cutting-edge programming languages (even for toy
projects), be involved with communities.

2.- There are no blatant problems awaiting for a solution anymore (it's
2018!). Successful startups have to provide an original, excellently-executed
approach to old problems.

3.- You have huge competition; be aware of that. A whole generation has been
taught to pursue the same goals as you.

4.- Finally, one always can network. Lots of non-tecnnical founders are
looking for CTOs.

~~~
brucephillips
> There are no blatant problems awaiting for a solution anymore (it's 2018!).

This is unlikely to be true. It's at least as untrue as it was in any previous
year. Good ideas are only blatantly obvious in hindsight.

~~~
vemv
I disagree. Airbnb, Uber, Amazon and many others are extremely basic ideas
that some person or another would have come up with sooner or later.

Basically it was a matter of being in the right place, right time, right
knowledge (and execution, of course)

Winners took it all.

~~~
mannykannot
Blatantly obvious ideas, and those that someone will come up with sooner or
later, are distinct categories, more or less by definition.

There are plenty of problems, the shortage is in problems with obvious
solutions that have not yet been implemented yet. One could argue that these
opportunities are becoming more fleeting, as more people are being drawn into
the search for them.

------
nikcub
Go and do some contracting work at a small business or startup - even if its
short term. You'll bump into all sorts of pain points that should be addressed
by someone taking the time to develop and market a good product.

It's no coincidence that there have been many successful products that have
started as internal tools written to solve internal problems.

------
hayksaakian
Is there any industry or history where you can draw from personal experience?

What inefficiencies have you noticed?

What problems have you noticed from the consumer end of your relationships
with businesses?

Could you make something obsolete with automation, or make something else more
efficient and profitable?

You don't need to be the first one to come up with an idea for a startup. Most
startups fail, even if they came up with a very new and unique idea.

You just need to be the one who does executes it better.

For people starting out, I would suggest looking at "inevitable" trends.
Things that seem like they will certainly be popular or prevalent in 2 to 5
years.

Examples:

\- Cannabis legalization: It's virtually inevitable that cannabis will be
legal in all 50 states, there's lots of room for ancillary businesses.

\- Crypto currency: This is becoming more and more mainstream. If you can come
up with some way for the average person to benefit from and want to use
crypto, there's great opportunity available for you.

\- VR: The tech for vr is improving every year, and mainstream adoption is
increasing. There's still no "killer app" for VR (a "killer app" is software
that convinces people to want to buy the hardware en masse).

\- IoT: Adoption is increasing for smart lights and other devices, but they're
still a luxury for most people. Can you come up with some connected everyday
device that people can't live without?

Look at what's working well in similar industries that could work well in
emerging industries.

One of the first "successes" I had was to create very simple apps for Android
in 2008/2009 which simply showed quotes from popular celebrities. The
technology was not impressive at all, but it was obvious to me that many
people would get smartphones in the next few years. I learned that you could
take something people love in one medium, and reproduce it for a new and
emerging medium to gain "free" marketing as the medium grows.

~~~
thisisit
> \- Crypto currency: This is becoming more and more mainstream. If you can
> come up with some way for the average person to benefit from and want to use
> crypto, there's great opportunity available for you.

This might be both good and bad as the steam runs out of the current climb.

That said, I have been wanting to build something which might solve the
volatility issue in cryptocurrency but see multiple problems. For one, I have
zero programming knowledge and I have been trying to learn but it is going no
where very fast. Second, the cryptocurrency crowd is difficult to please. This
service, at least for starters, might cost a lot of money which might not go
down well.

------
dcarmo
I think that one business model that will never get old is information spread.
Most (all?) of the problems we see in the world today could possibly be fixed
if people were more knowledgeable. And I don't mean necessarily textbook
knowledge, but common stuff as well.

For example, I live in a somewhat small city and it's not easy to know where
can I go to have swimming classes. Google could help me with that, but usually
these places aren't very tech-savvy (or they do have a certain presence, but
they don't keep it updated).

Another great example: [https://www.pointy.com/](https://www.pointy.com/).

------
nofilter
I would also be happy to find a cool thing to work on the side that could
benefit people and/or companies. But, just like you, am not exactly the "Idea
generator".

------
peterburkimsher
If you have an idea, try putting it on Halfbakery.

The ideas I've had that I don't feel like pursuing are on my profile: Age of
Empires Theme Park, Removing wires, fences with two cameras, Translated
Search, Vibrating Wristbands for GPS, Web TV Channel. If you need ideas, read
around there to get some inspiration.

[http://www.halfbakery.com/user/peterburk](http://www.halfbakery.com/user/peterburk)

------
fillskills
Pick one your ideas. Start meeting people who are already working on something
similar. Start meeting potential customers. Just talking to people in the same
space and potential clients will change your idea or help it grow. Then start
working on it. Build anything. Don’t try to be perfect in version 1. But plan
for long term perfection instead over multiple iterations. Be proud of what
you create. Whatever that may be

------
CM30
Come up with a way to support creators by buying individual articles, videos,
podcasts, etc. Ads aren't gonna work for much longer, Patreon type solutions
don't seem sustainable for everyone and people won't be putting down money on
dozens of subscriptions anytime soon either. There needs to be a way to pay
for content like a physical product.

First person or organisation to fix this problem will rake in the cash.

------
V2hLe0ThslzRaV2
>> "My last product was a hypothesis that never gained traction"

Best place to start is where you already are, not a new venture - what exactly
was the product and what did you do to gain traction?

EDIT: You posted a "Show HN" linking to the site below [1], is this the
project you're referencing?

[1] [https://www.helloreads.com/](https://www.helloreads.com/)

------
f_allwein
One thing I would find really useful is a web tool that can scrape/ filter/
list events. E.g. in most cities, it is impossible to get a simple listing of
all screenings of films in cinemas, let alone filter them by location/time/...
or mash them up with tools tracking your own taste. Same for concerts,
theatre, art exhibitions, ...

~~~
brucephillips
The hard thing about this is fragmentation. Building a web scraper for events
means extracting information from a wide variety of non-standard websites.
Even Eventbrite aggregates events manually, I think.

~~~
f_allwein
Yes, except you'd only have to do it once for each entity (e.g. chain of
cinemas). Plus, this should not be rocket science, so maybe you can crowd
source extractors...

------
aqsheehy
Asymmetric knowledge is hard to come by, people aren't going to give it away
here. For what it's worth the few times I've had an idea that turned out to be
valuable (retrospectively) it was because I learned a new technology. Might be
worth specializing in some niche tech for a few months instead of focusing on
product ideas.

------
techman9
Evergreen:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

Also:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html)

------
narrator
You could consult and see what problems businesses are having that you work
with.

~~~
borplk
This is a popular suggestion but I don't think as well as people make it
sound.

Lots of problems don't have solutions that would be viable for a new startup
(especially not for lean bootstrapped ones).

The problems tend to be either so very specific where the solution would be
"just use Excel" or "you need a custom made software", or somewhere in between
there.

Or so common and obvious and popular where the solution is already hyper
saturated with million dollar and billion dollar companies.

For example very few businesses have customer service support software needs
that are not already satisfied by the huge array of existing solutions.

Even if they do, that knowledge is not suddenly going to give you any
advantages. You end up at the position of building a feature of a much bigger
software ("We like Zendesk but it's missing ____ feature").

------
bsaul
Do you have friends working in different fields ? Spend more time
understanding their day to day job. IT people lives aren’t a good starting
point to come up with new business ideas. Use other people’s lives instead.

------
troels
Did you mail businesses out of the blue? What did you write to them?

~~~
ryeguy_24
I did. I emailed a bunch of different smaller companies in different
sectors/industries. Explained to them that I build software to help small
companies and am interested in knowing if they either have been looking for a
product that doesn’t exist or are unhappy with a current product. Got some
friendly responses but most said things are working well.

~~~
random42
You asked the wrong question. You should only ask how do they work, and think
yourself about the solution. They are business, not software developers.

~~~
mLuby
Respectfully, I hear this advice for sales all the time, and it sounds silly
unless you've already built a relationship. If someone cold-calls me and
starts asking open-ended questions, they're wasting my time.

~~~
brucephillips
This isn't sales. It's market research. Your point stands, though. It's
actually harder to get market research meetings than sales meetings, because
you have nothing to offer. You have to go through your network, or meet people
obliquely through interest groups.

------
rburhum
Why limit to small business? Talk (not email) to a company with a lot of money
and figure out their biggest pain point. That is how I would do it now if I
had to start over

------
tmastro
I'm in a very similar situation and would love to connect. We may be able to
help each other. If you're interested let me know how I can get in touch.

------
brucephillips
What problems have you had in your own life? Surely there's an opportunity
there that at least deserves further market research.

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
What do you do now? I found problems at work.

