How did you find a problem you're working on?

I read Hackernews regularly. There were a few heavily participated threads about the death of Flash and how there was no easy way to create animations.

Being a techie and an artist, I found this intriguing. I asked if anyone was interested in creating a Flash replacement and got no response. I went ahead and created an MVP any way.

Launched it on Hackernews. The first two versions' response was ok (about 300 views). But the third one had about 15000 visitors and it crashed my web server twice.

So that's how I found and worked on my idea.
https://toonclip.com - Create animations in minutes

I was frustrated leading a team of 6 content loaders at a large business, and had an SEO manager (who was more senior than me) emailing me every few days with small inefficiencies in their content loading. For example, pages not indexed, images not compressed, poor page titles, missing descriptions, bad formatted URLs etc

I knew they weren't following best-practice 100% of the time and I'd try to stay on top of it, but when you have a website with thousands of pages, and dozens more being added every day, it's tough to ensure everyone is as precise as you are.

So I emailed my brother (a dev) and asked for software to scan the entire website at midnight every single night, and email me in the morning what pages to go fix things on. All existing solutions were overly expensive and complicated. I wanted the 8am email telling me exactly what to do.

I made it publicly available 6 or so months later, and am now relaunching it soon as RightHandMan.io (work in progress) but with a more educational spin on things, so anyone can pick it up and use it without prior knowledge.

So I started with a frustrating problem for me, then put a price on it and saw interest, but not starting to polish it up.

I wanted to learn more about labs that are developing new materials. I'm fascinated by "futuristic technologies" – and I think new materials are at the frontier of what will make tomorrow better. Think about advanced antibacterial nanocoatings to fight COVID19, or simply Patagonia's amazing wool.

So I Googled "top material science labs" and got a list of academic programs and random blog listicles. I tried searching labs in other domains - AI, nuclear energy, longevity, lab-grown foods, autonomous driving. Nul. Some were easier to find than others but still dispersed.

So I designed a developed an MVP: an online directory of labs, think tanks, startups, and VCs that can be filtered by the cutting edge domain tech that they're pushing forward. It felt a bit gimmicky but I knew that I, for one, would find it useful in surveying emerging technologies, and maybe others would too. I called the platform "Progress Labs XYZ."

Since it's more of a research resource, I emailed a few prominent university think tanks if they'd be interested in hosting and supporting the platform once it's finished — and out of five emails, four replied within two days.

I just answered a similar question here.

As a full stack developer, when I'm wearing my frontend hat, I spend 50% of my time copying designs from pictures, Sketch and Figma into code. There had to be a better way... 🤓

Good/bad problems are everywhere. The only thing that makes you different is execution.

I found my passion project based on years of observation and needs from individuals and startups. No rocket science, just something that makes me happy :)

Maybe you can start with a passion project? @4th_roommate