How to spot the problems that are worth building something for?
I'm finding it really difficult to spot problems that are worth solving through software.
I've worked only as a bartender/waiter and a programmer. Is it because of my limited expertise?
It's definitely a skill you have to work on.
A few tricks I think are useful/important:
Be outgoing and talk to more people about subjects you think might interest you - you'll always receive more and better feedback if the person you're talking to recognises that you have a genuine interest in that field...
Focus on the problem and don't talk about solutions too early.
Remember that a lot of serious problems aren't recognised as such by customers (otherwise they would have tried to solve them, obviously). That's okay, but it means you need to dig in to their daily routine --> what repetitive tasks do they/an employee have to waste time on? Or another classic is
what task do they have a complicated excel sheet for?Quantify early. Ask for money/contracts early - it's the only way to really get to the truth of whether the problem is an important one to the customer or not
Talk to multiple people (try not to build a solution with n<5 customers in mind)
Be friendly
Most important: Be persistent but know when to give up. Often, you'll start off solving a problem with a subpar solution and (hopefully) develop a better solution or (if the problem turns out to be less lucrative than first appearances suggested) you'll notice an adjacent problem which makes more sense to work on...
Good luck!
PS I just read that you are a programmer. Assuming you do some web/mobile stuff, why not try freelancing for some similar clients (eg plumbers) and productize whatever you find yourself having to build again and again for each client specifically?
Hey @louisswiss, thanks for your in-depth answer. Loved the "
what task do they have a complicated excel sheet for?", never heard it being put like this.A thing that caught my eye for discovering the pain was The mom test. Have you read it? What do you think of it? http://momtestbook.com/
Asking for money early on(before you build anything) always seemed like an almost-impossible idea for things that might take months(or even funding) to build. Am I over-thinking it?
PS: Just subscribed to your newsletter. Looking forward to your emails.
PS2: Funny thing that you mention freelancing, I'm actually thinking of transitioning to it fully(currently working a full-time job with a part-time freelancing gig). My problem is that I have only 1.5y of experience at a small outsourcing company(5 people). Even though I have some experience with building projects from the ground up(alone or with a small team) and with "why build/customer thinking", not just executing, I'm having doubts because of my time-experience and how it might look to clients.
I've heard good things but have no experience with it myself, maybe someone else can chime in.
I think you are slightly, yes.
It is objectively possible - look at Kickstarter for any number of examples.
Obviously there are some products/markets where it will be easier and some where it'll be more difficult.
But at that point you're not really looking for the money, rather you want the commitment. So a contract (I will pay X when Y is ready) is also fine.
If you go down the freelancing route, it's easier to assess whether the customer is willing to pay for the problem to go away, because you can do a custom solution for them (no matter how hacky). Just be careful with the IP!
Thanks!
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Most of us here are too obsessed with novelty. However, the vast majority of successful businesses have a large number of successful competitors, and it works out just fine.
So if you're having trouble coming up with an idea, consider starting by solving a problem that others are already addressing (profitably). That way, you know the demand is actually there, and that the problem is actually valuable. Unless you pick some sort of winner-take-all market, it should be possible to differentiate yourself from the competition.
Can you develop a unique solution to the problem that will appeal to a different type of customer? For example, there are fast food restaurants, vegan restaurants, high-end restaurants, delivery restaurants, ethnic cuisine, etc.
Can you deliver your solution through a different channel than than others? For example, dating personals did well via newspapers. Plenty of Fish grew largely through SEO once Google came along. OKCupid took advantage of social networks to grow via viral content. Match.com uses paid advertising. Tinder got big once mobile got big.
Etc.
That's great advice.
This is even better advice. I truly believe we're at an inflection point in the tech industry where companies like MailChimp today are in a similar situation to the Ford Model T in the early 20th Century.
And we're about to see an explosion of independent smaller companies eat up their market share by being way better tailored to specific verticals/niches than a single monolith like MailChimp could ever hope to achieve...
I always worry about advising new founders on the hunt for a project to look at established companies for inspiration. It's not bad advice per se, just really easy to fall into the trap of copying what the company is doing on the surface, without really understanding the problem.
That's true, happens all the time. I think the opposite is true, too — new founders building completely innovative solutions from scratch also tend to over-focus on their product and its features and not truly understand the problem they're solving (or should be solving).
It's a tough obstacle to overcome, I think, because it's so easy to think we're on the right track when we're really not. Put someone new in the cockpit of a plane, and they'll know immediately they can't fly it. Put someone new in the founder's seat of a business, and it may take years of adding feature after feature before they realize that adding to their product is not synonymous with improving their business.
Definitely.
It's so easy to do a bad job of prioritising as a new founder (and, come to think of it, as a repeat founder as well) that you're almost guaranteed to fail first time one way or another.
I guess it's just important to make (and recognise) those mistakes quickly, and have the self-awareness to correctly diagnose what went wrong.
Look at things in your own life that you feel could be better optimised, redesigned, rethought.
Better yet, assist others with problems they are trying to solve. You'll make some really good connections, and you will learn to see things from a new perspective. Sounds like the normal kind of advice, i know. But it really does work!
I think one of the best advices I've heard was in a recent IH podcast where they said that one of the best ways of finding a problem to work on is working on another problem. Even if the first problem fails, you will often find another one just because you are doing things. Every time you do a large-scale project or are just doing activities in life, you will tend to start to see pain points.
I think the problems are out there, it is only a matter of sensibility.
A different thing is if solving a specific problem could be economically profitable.
For instance, wasn't there anything that, as a waiter, you had to do repeatedly? Wasn't there anything that you could do more efficiently? How was the restaurant taking reservations? How were they handling stock? Or employee leave, etc.?
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