The startup I'm working on now is in the project management space, which I think is an unsolved and hard problem. And it's definitely something people want. When I started working on it I thought that it would be pretty easy, but I found that when I asked 10 project managers they all wanted subtly different software.
Everybody wanted good project management software, but unfortunately everyone I talked to also had differing opinions on what this would include. The hardest part was getting the details right, not from a coding perspective which is pretty simple, but from an interface and usability perspective. Nobody sees the code anyway.
Solving a problem in detail, and doing it in a way that people want is really really hard. Often much harder than coding it.
yes, the problem is like the famous quote of judge Potter Stewart when asked how to define obscenity: "I don't know, but I damn well know it when I see it"
Users don't know what they want, that is the problem you have to solve. They'll be able to recognise software that solves their problem when they see it, but they have no idea of what it should look like or what it should do when you ask them.
The hard part is taking all the itches you hear about from users, reading between the lines, inferring, asking additional questions, making mock-ups, etc. and creating a good cure for the itches.
I think that successful execution of this is the primary factor in successful software.
I have found that out of approximately 500 users (talking face to face) you get 1-2 who actually DO know what they need, how it should look and act. We hired one and listened intently to the other.
It's a long search, but really, really worth it. I agree though - the coding is the simple part.
I tend to feel cheated out of my time when I come to the end of a post like this one, because it seems to focus on the wrong thing. Here's what my issue is:
"What do people want?" is a very broad and imprecise question, and on that level, it is very easy to answer. I've been alive for a little more than a quarter of a century, and I can easily tell you what I want.
1) I want it to be easier to maintain and improve my health.
2) I want my relationships - friendships, business partnerships, romances - to require less effort to maintain and grow.
3) I want it to be easier to acquire and retain new knowledge and learn new skills.
I am willing to bet that at their core, everyone has an approximation of at least those desires, and then some. However, the things that I've outlined are just the difficulties of "the human condition", if you will. Breaking down those problems into their more detailed subproblems is difficult, but it seems that solving those is infinitely more difficult, and pushes them off into the realm of science fiction. These are important, hard problems where a working technical solution would make the inventors orders of magnitude more money than solving some pain point that some company in some niche market has.
Yeah, I also felt that the poster was just bragging on and on like a boring talk at a bar counter... oh wait, it's my post!
Now I remember. It was within a long discussion with a guy who kept complaining nobody had respected his accomplishment and wanted to hire him. I wanted to tell him that he had to have feedback loop to align his and others' interest. (And to be honest, I was already irritated to the guy at this point.) That was the context.
I don't deny that there are important problems worth to tackle even nobody seems to care about them. But if you do so, you won't complain about nobody caring, will you?
I strongly support the part about opening up and not keeping your ideas to yourself.
I'll eventually write a post on this, but if you remember Mark Cuban's "open source funding" from a few days ago, there are similarities. I have a good idea for a product and I posted it on Mark's blog. And the idea got written about in 70 newspapers and magazines within 48 hours.
Is anyone copying my idea because it's public? I don't think so.
this is a good idea. make categories and people can submit whatever they want. you then have a voting system in place and try to police for obvious dupes.
"You can't expect people to tell what they want straightforwardly if you ask them, since people often don't know what they want at the surface of their consciousness, or cannot articulate it."
People do tell you what they want, it's just that normally companies have already formed to supply those needs.
On the similar note: I consider Apple at the top of innovation pyramid because they create something with (almost) no predecessors, yet they make something that 'everyone' wants! To me, that's true innovation!
The startup I'm working on now is in the project management space, which I think is an unsolved and hard problem. And it's definitely something people want. When I started working on it I thought that it would be pretty easy, but I found that when I asked 10 project managers they all wanted subtly different software.
Everybody wanted good project management software, but unfortunately everyone I talked to also had differing opinions on what this would include. The hardest part was getting the details right, not from a coding perspective which is pretty simple, but from an interface and usability perspective. Nobody sees the code anyway.
Solving a problem in detail, and doing it in a way that people want is really really hard. Often much harder than coding it.