Ask HN: What are good ways to find startup problems to solve? - pigpigs
======
mpbm
If you're looking for a startup, something that's supposed to start cheap and
scale huge in <10 years, then you're probably only looking at problems that
can be addressed by software on the internet.

That being said, you don't have to look there. You can start a huge variety of
businesses just by gaining modest expertise in something new and then charging
people for doing that thing. EX: get a $1K drone, learn to fly it, and charge
half of what it would cost a helicopter/plane to get the same shot. It's not a
startup, but it's a business, and it might lead to a startup.

Startups seem to be bimodal (no I don't have data for this) in that they're
either business-focused or solution-focused. Uber is business-focused. They
don't give a damn about anything other than fat stacks of cash. Tesla is
solution-focused. Musk just needs the business to last long enough to achieve
his goal of shifting the market away from fossil fuels.

It's a lot easier to find a business opportunity than to find a solution
you're passionate about AND makes for a good business. Most people who just
pursue a solution end up in non-profits or simply realize that there's no way
to sustain an organization providing that solution.

If you're just looking for a chewy problem to solve, then PM me because I'm
working on a good one.

------
gernest
This question has also been in my head for a while.

I suggest maybe we stop looking for problems to solve and start solving
problems we have.

A simple problem that I have right now is ,

I am in need of a high quality technical text book that is in my local
language (swahili).

First I can't buy anything from amazon or the other online retailers because I
don't have a credit card.

Second, even if I am able to order from amazon I wont be able to get a Swahili
version of the book ( Due to a myriad of corporate reasons).

Third, I'm broke I can't afford the dollars that also accompany the shipping
costs and the tax that my government has just raised.

So, I sit down and think. Maybe it is about time, we start giving some love to
the millions os swahili speakers eager to contribute to the recipes of this
big cake called internet.

I find static sites cheap, and elegant. I mix the solution with strong
security, and use modern tools to bring speed and relevancy. Many people start
to use my platform, a new eco system is born and bam there goes a new amazon,
solving a real problem and I'm sure as hell I can afford to pay in my local
currency.

The company gets acquired by, guess who? Then you zero the clock and start the
whole process again.

From the example above, you can notice, I never looked for a problem to solve
but I just solved the problem I had.

~~~
icebraining
But how would your startup make money, if your customers don't have credit
cards and are broke?

How do you make something for the hand-to-mouth working class, who are neither
so poor that you can coax the wealthier into donating, nor have any disposable
income?

~~~
gernest
The customers are broke because the quotes are in dollars, and the TSH is less
valuable than USD. Which again another startup problem waiting to be solved.

The lack of credit card, is another problem that I have. Which is another
startup problem waiting to be solved.

People pay if there is value in what you are offering.

~~~
thebenedict
How is the value of the Tanzanian shilling relative to the dollar a problem to
solve with a startup?

~~~
gernest
I admit to over each on that statement. But my point still stands, with
context of the example.

Buying things with local quotations might be good for the scenario.

------
BenoitP
I'd argue that in finding a subject for a startup, you don't want to find a
problem. I mean, why would anyone want _problems_?

What you want for a startup is fertile ground.

\-------

Go to the nearest upper-middle-class person you know (at the 10th percentile
of revenues). Ask for their account statement. For each line, try to answer
the following:

1) What are the margins? Is the price of the item driven by costs of
production, or by what people accepted to pay? You want the latter. Prefer
emotional over utility.

2) How did the person came to know the product? What were the drivers of
acquiring the product? What did close the sale? What were the alternatives?

3) What is the cost of entering this market? Would you be able to do it?

\- Then you have a list of fertile grounds, out of which you can try to work
out:

4) What can be improved over this market? How would you sell differently?

5) What can be improved over this product? What would you modify in the
product?

6) Are they buying it? Build only the store front: throw a landing page
somewhere, stir some activity, see if you get emails. Interview the leads you
got. It's ok to announce to people you won't be doing X.

7) And then, only then, you can work on a problem to exploit the scarcity of
being the only one having solved it.

~~~
danieltillett
Great post. There is no reason to limit this process to the top 10%. Plenty of
money over the years has been made focusing on the middle (think Wamart).

------
lewisjoe
I assume you probably tried 'scratching your itch' and it isn't really going
anywhere from there.

Not all itches are opportunities. All great, subtle opportunities lying out
there may not necessarily happen to be your itches.

That said, if you are looking for problems i.e _your_ problems that you want
to solve, but just couldn't find something, then what's wrong is that you
aren't _doing_ a lot of things.

Go shopping. Watch out for things that you think could be made better.
Accompany a friend to a hospital. See what solvable problems lie in the
process of treating a patient in a hospital. Experience a lot of things. I'm
sure you'll eventually hit on something that you can solve.

Another good exercise is to look for things that qualify as unsolved problems
in different domains/industries. This isn't tough. HN's _Who is hiring_ thread
is a great place to start. These threads are a key knowledge base of people
working on problems. Go ahead, just do a HN search and you'll realize there's
a lot of things waiting to be made better!

"What are good ways to find startup problems to solve?" \- is a deep question.
If you do crack things out (and I'm sure you will), please make sure you share
it with the community :)

------
trjordan
Talk to people who you want to help. Try to figure out if you're good at
something they're not.

If you start a startup, you're going to spend every waking hour for, like, 2
years thinking about the problems your customers have. (After that, you'll
start thinking about building / structuring your company more.) You have to
like them. You have to understand them. Your current ideas about what will
sell and scale are, at best, poorly specified. Go ask people what their hopes
and fears are.

On the other hand, you also have to actually provide something novel. Think
about what you believe that's contrarian, or you learned in the last year or
two about the current state of things. Write that down, but don't spend a ton
of time on it. That's probably going to be at the root of the solution you
come up with.

For me, this was marketing analytics. I was working in marketing, and I like
marketers. I was a dev for a while, so I knew how to glue together the data
sets marketers used. The specific problem/answer took a solid 6 months to
really come together, because it took me 6 months to go have a couple dozen
really solid conversations with VPs of Marketing. It turns out there's about 3
classes of tools that are vastly underutilized by modern B2B marketers because
they're poorly integrated. If you put them together, a 4th tool naturally
emerges. So we're building that. It's going to take a while, because it's a
lot of functionality, but it certainly wasn't something that we knew we were
going to build at the beginning of the journey.

Go talk to people. Empathize, be curious, apply your slant. Your start is
going to have your fingerprints all over it, so don't be afraid to get really
personal about finding a problem that gets you excited to solve.

------
Muted
Paul Graham wrote an essay on this topic which might help you.
[http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

~~~
pigpigs
I love this article. I'm very much inspired by what is written here, but for
the most part can't find an 'itch' to scratch.

Right now I'm just building stuff I consider is cool / fun and see how it goes
from there.

~~~
jbpetersen
Just curious, what do you find cool / fun?

~~~
pigpigs
Unprecedented applications mostly enabled by new / disruptive technology.
Things that do scratch my itch (even though most of them don't resonate with
others)

Right now I'm working on Ethereum dApps as I have a strong feeling that the
world will gravitate towards p2p / distributed tech and Ethereum is arguably
one of the key technologies that will bring us there

~~~
jbpetersen
I can't wait to see how the Ethereum ecosystem progresses from now up through
sharding. Plus the drama is priceless entertainment.

------
verdaax
[https://nugget.one](https://nugget.one)

(via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12215184](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12215184)
[http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-297-h...](http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-297-how-
to-charge-for-startup-ideas-with-guest-ken-wallace) )

------
jakobegger
"Scratch your own itch"

I've built two apps (MDB Viewer and Postico) because the tool I needed for my
work didn't exist. It turns out, other people often have similar problems!

~~~
jventura
I was curious about your tools since it's really uncommon nowadays for one-man
ventures to build desktop software. I'm assuming your Postico projecto is the
postegres viewer. Not looking for exact numbers, but how is it selling? Are
you able to make a living out of it, or it's mostly beer money?

~~~
jakobegger
My current revenue is around 10.000€ per month (mostly from Postico).

I'm not really a one-man venture anymore; I've recently hired a part time
employee (I'd like to hire someone full time, but it's harder than I expected
to find people)

There are lots of other one-man ventures making desktop apps. From the top of
my head I can think of MarsEdit, Base from Menial, SQLPro manager, Acorn
(image editor), Dash (documentation browser).... all Mac apps made by a single
developer.

------
fractalsea
This startup was created to solve just this problem:
[https://nugget.one](https://nugget.one)

One of the founders is the host of the Techzing podcast
[http://techzinglive.com](http://techzinglive.com). You can hear some of the
background on Nugget if you listen to the more recent episodes.

~~~
pigpigs
Awesome! I was just thinking the problem with finding startup problems might
be a good one to solve aha!

------
jjp
From your follow-on comments I'm not sure whether the challenge for you is
finding problems or identifying that it's a problem that is worth working on.
Providing a little more information on the sort of problems you have seen and
then why you have decided to not work on them would help others be more
specific with their guidance.

~~~
pigpigs
I think that problems will obviously need to resonate with enough people for a
startup to even exist.

As a recent graduate, honestly I have not experienced many of the industry
pain points, and am limited to the really general food delivery, dating apps,
edtech tools.

I did work on certain problems before. A group of us worked on a few versions
of an MVP for an in-class active learning backchannel that many students &
professors thought they needed. It was a complete disaster that ended with
both sides realizing it was not a pain enough problem for them.

I also worked on a dating app that tried to solve a problem in my high school
days. It allowed someone to anonymously send 'smooches' to their crushes, who
would ideally see the email and sign up to do the same to their own crushes,
alerting them of a match if they sent one to a person who sent to them. It was
fun but didn't really get a lot of attention and traction.

Right now in a bit of an idea drought and don't know what to work on
concretely.

~~~
jjp
Thoughts on how to push through

1\. Pick an industry that you are either interested in and/or you believe is
going to be more profitable - i.e. financial services pay more than retail
therefore more potential.

2\. Take a friend from University who works in that industry and not in
technology to dinner, beer, coffee and find out what aspects of their job they
find are the biggest PITA.

3\. Read up what the management consultants are talking about. Not they should
be considered gospel on problem or solution but if they are trying to sell
something they believe there is a) problem that exists in that industry, b)
there is a market for a solution and c) the industry is buying that solution.

4\. Read up what your potential competitors are doing about the problem

5\. Go to your thinking space (mines the movies) and noodle.

6\. Compare your idea to the knowledge you've acquired in 2,3 and 4.

You can bail out at any point, you can do 1 through 4 in any order but do them
before 5 and 6. You can be running multiple problems in parallel and you'll
probably end up with ideas that coalesce. Then when you've got to step 6 make
a decision about whether you're still interested in the problem, because now
comes the hard work.

------
ifemide06
Solve a problem for yourself! Ideas are in our everyday lives - look closely,
those things/services/tools you 'wish' could exist, you just might spot a
niche - then build it for 'you', and you'll realise how many people needs this
product/tools/services!

~~~
pigpigs
That's good advice! But I've been trying to do this and I might be too content
with my life cause I can't find these frustrating problems / 'itches'.

~~~
malcolmocean
Too content with your life? Think bigger. eg...
[http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/](http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/)

...it doesn't have to be climate change per se. The point is that if you don't
see things to improve on a given level, look at a higher level. Or a longer
time horizon.

A lot of this is going to be hard to solve on the level of software. But not
all! And maybe you can team up with people with other skills.

------
brikis98
Check out the talk Startup Ideas and Validation [1]. The key insights are:

* Innovative ideas are rarely, if ever, eureka moments. They usually evolve after spending a huge amount of time thinking about a specific problem.

* Ideas do not form out of nothing. You are not creating new knowledge so much as finding new ways to connect knowledge that you already have. So the more you know, the more ideas you can have.

* The environment plays a huge role in helping you combine your existing knowledge in novel ways. There are a number of tweaks you can make to your environment that make it easier to come up with great ideas, including keeping an idea journal (write down not only ideas, but problems you encounter on a daily basis), regularly letting your mind wander and relax (fixation can prevent creativity), adding constraints to the problem (constraints breed creativity), playing the "Wayne Gretzky Game" (live in the future and build what's missing), and seeking out pain (where there is pain, there is opportunity).

[1] [http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2016/02/14/startup-ideas-
and...](http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2016/02/14/startup-ideas-and-
validation/)

------
mercurialuser
I solved a problem I had writing some simple scripts. I think it solves a
problem for no less than 5k people in my country.

I spoke with a couple of friends with the same problem and they were really
interested so I integrated all the scripts in a program with a easy to use
gui...

The 2 friends never used the program... the website I created got almost no
visits from organic search.

It solves a problem that is related to schools but you have to use the
software since the start of the school year to be of help so I'm in the
process to cold-email some people about the software...

Unfortunately there are no places where the potential users hang...

After all the time spent reading about mvp, startups, releases, growth
hacking, I'm proud I could complete the software and release it... also if
nobody will never use it.

I had a pain and solved it but it is not enough when it is impossible to reach
the audience of possible users...

------
josephan
I think meeting new people is a great way to find startup ideas if you
personally don't have any. I am collaborating with two different friends that
were complete strangers prior to a couple a months for fun and both the ideas
are not mine. I am working hard to make sure both gets good traction.

------
_audakel
move to a developing nation. i spent 2 yrs on a service mission for mexico.
really opened my eyes to how different life is for people outside the US.
simple things like mobile phone banking are huge game changers in these
countries. go and look around for awhile and you will find some big
opportunities.

------
erikb
If you are looking for problems, it's very easy: Do stuff.

Not doing anything you don't know any real problems and can only think about
the next photo sharing app.

Working with others on actual customer tasks lets you learn to know the
customers situation and problems.

------
dos4gw
Have a kid. Everything is broken.

~~~
michaelrhansen
I am about to do this and am very interested in seeing this, I have a feeling
you are very right. :)

------
weinzierl
Work for a Fortune 500 for a year - finding their pain points will be
unavoidable.

------
blrgeek
Check out effectuation.org/learn

The idea is to start with who you know, what you know, and who you are. Then
through conversations with people you know, ask them their problems that they
are ready to pay to solve. Find common things that several of them are ready
to pay for..

That's a great way to start, and will give you great problems that very few
others might want to solve..

------
nerdwaller
I think the only real way is to live in the world outside of only development.
There you will find crazy niches that are still far behind and could really
benefit from a tech infusion.

Most people who solved a major problem wanted to meet a need of a market, and
that need is hard to see unless you're familiar with the market.

------
samblr
The satiated man and the hungry man do not see the same thing when they look
at a loaf of bread - Rumi.

So be hungry or starve self of necessities. eg: Take public transport instead
of a car. Walk few miles if u want to get somewhere instead of car during
weekends.

------
jennazenk
1) think of frustrating situations that you encounter in your daily life 2)
determine if that is a situation other people also find frustrating 3) if so,
there is probably an underlying problem to the situation, just waiting to be
solved.

~~~
pigpigs
Lots of people talk about this, but do they really occur that often? I don't
seem to encounter many such situations that can be solved much better than
current offerings. As a fresh graduate there is a lack of domain experience as
well for me to understand (or know at all) the pain points in various
industries.

Perhaps I'm just not thinking out of the box enough.

~~~
leesalminen
I tend to notice lots of inefficiencies at small businesses that I frequent.
When the front desk person says they're having computer problems; that's a
great time to strike up a conversation and see what they think about the
software they use every day and how they think it could be better. If you
think you could fix that problem, you're on the right track.

------
ShirsenduK
Google Trends

------
mdotk
Bookmarking, some nice ideas here

------
tiredwired
Start a startup.

