

Ask HN: Trying to find Pain Points for business - johnmurch

Basically I am looking for pain points and crappy processes. If you have a job and do something or if you are a business owner and have something that sucks, what is it?<p>If I could wave a magical wand and build it, what would it be and how would it solve the problem. Thanks!
======
canterburry
OK, a few observations:

1\. Not sure HN is the best place to ask this. Yes, there are plenty of start
ups here and entrepreneurs, however, they are all busy just like you finding
ideas

2\. Go where business owners hang out who don't necessary have the tech skills
in house to solve their problems.

3\. Start smoking cigars

I pick up a cigar every now and then and head over to any nicer establishment
with a good bar, good scotch, atmosphere and where people mingle.

1\. The people I meet at cigar places are typically business owners...and not
in tech. They own manufacturing businesses, finance, retail and other low tech
brick and mortar type businesses who have a need for tech but typically none
in house.

2\. Cigar smokers love talking to other cigar smokers, even when you are a
complete stranger. Also, smoking a cigar takes 1 - 2 hours...so you got them
pinned. Start the conversation soft, casual...just like dating. Then start
finding out more about them, what they do. Ask some simple questions about
their field and let them explain as if they are pure genius. Start talking
about their business...and now you start narrowing down on problems, issues.

I do this all the time. It's amazing what you can learn...and they'll love to
tell you about it because they are having a good time smoking cigars, sipping
scotch and hiding from the wife.

I just recently spoke to a small retail owner who has a chain of consignment
stores with a number of POS systems. Buying a POS system isn't a problem, it's
doing the financial reporting and consolidating data from multiple locations.
He had been looking for quite some time and couldn't find anything good that
actually could understand that data came from multiple locations, rather than
multiple POSs inside the same store. He also had a huge number of different
SKUs since no item coming in is the same as any other in a consignment store.
Who knew...I would have thought this was a solved problem. It's a totally un-
sexy space but I really think this is where you'll find you best ideas.

~~~
johnmurch
Love this idea - will try! Thanks!

------
doubt_me
I maintain a tiny project that is called the freeware index and Instead of
using a website I simply created a subreddit

reddit.com/r/freewareindex

I started it a few years ago with zero web design knowledge and have learned a
bunch.

basically I am a computer tech and it was a pain in the ass to keep up with
all the good software that I used so I solved it by building the freeware
index.

at this moment there are 2 ways to get the entire index and one of them is via
a Google spreadsheet. I recently discovered Google script and wanted to use it
to expand the spreadsheet. with Google script I wanted to create a linkable
row or sheet instead of the entire spreadsheet. Or somehow separate each sheet
into a neat page on the blogger site I put up tariqghrayyib.blogspot.com.

the only reason as to why its so small is because I have restarted the project
at least 4 times from scratch and this is the farthest I have gone so far
simply because I made the subreddit where I can get more exposure.

if anyone knows Google script and can help that would be beyond awesome

~~~
johnmurch
Interesting use-case. For keeping all of these sites and up to date I don't
have anything directly making it 100% perfect, but take a look at
[http://www.wibki.com/](http://www.wibki.com/) or
[https://kippt.com/](https://kippt.com/) as a way to store/share the content.

Thanks for the submission!

~~~
doubt_me
wibki looks awesome thanks for replying

------
wikwocket
You may be interested in the technique Amy Hoy recommends in her 30x500 app
development course, called a "sales safari." See her blog (unicornfree.com)
for details, but the basic idea is to find out where people in a given
niche/business hang out, and then lurk there, documenting what you see. Common
watering holes are usually places people complain about things and
commiserate, and paint points are likely to come up there.

This works better than _asking_ people what their pain points are. For
heaven's sake, if you want to know what someone really thinks, asking them is
often the worst approach to take!

------
NovemberWest
If they could answer your question, they probably already fixed it. You need
to figure out the solution for them. You probably also need to figure out the
pain point.

~~~
AznHisoka
Heh.. If OP had asked this question a year ago, I might have given him a few
good answers. Now I went ahead and implemented it, and the app should be out
pretty soon. So yeah, if you ask techies what pain points they have, they
probably are implementing the solution already.

