How do you find great problems to solve?
Hi Indie Hackers!
It's mostly agreed in here that having a customer segment with an actual problem to solve is a bare minimum to start a business. But how do you find great problems to solve?
There's always "scratching your own itch", but having a problem doesn't mean you are passionate about solving it nor that it's a viable market. So what's the alternative?
I guess meeting people who might have problems you can solve could be a great way to uncover potential problems but how do you ask them what their problems are?
What's your process to find potential business opportunities that might be worth investigating?
Sounds like finding problems to solve is a problem that needs to be solved.
This is a great question and really the crux of early entrepreneurship (finding opportunities).
The problem with problems is that they are infinite and most of them aren't worth solving. Everyone has problems. But you have to find a business problem that is worth solving. It usually takes a business relationship to dig this out.
You have to dig them out. One way to do this is to pick a segment that you are interested in and just focus on it. Do it, join it, try it, build a services business for it, etc., until you find something worth working on.
In my experience, I didn't uncover problems until I jumped in and did something in an area that I was interested in.
Even though you can find a problem and introduce a brand-new solution, but it's super difficult to educate the end-users, who are not familiar with your product.
My approach is that looking for existing solutions, find the pain points and try to make a better version of it. As a result, people has already educated what your new solution is and they are likely to switch to your product if it could fix their problem.
For instance,
Jira is so big, clumsy and it tends for Enterprise users => Trello is born, minimal, easy to use and for small SME.
Fiddler, Wireshark, .... are too old, heavy and painful to use as a daily debugging tool -> Proxyman is born and many users immediately move to a new home since Proxyman has the same features, native app, easy to use, ...
Hope this can answer your question 👏
I don't have a process. I'm just scratching my own itch. I'm relatively confident I'll be able to make it work because there's already market validation for the thing I'm building.
The alternative option is to go talk to people! Don't just ask, "what problems do you have?" Ask them what they do. Try to understand that. Potential pain points may come up, and you can ask if they've ever tried to do anything about it. If they have tried multiple things but can't get anything to work, there's an opportunity for a solution there.
I highly recommend "The Mom Test" book by Rob Fitzpatrick. It talks all about this - how to talk to customers, identify problems, etc. I think it's excellent. It also talks about Market Risk vs. Product Risk when evaluating potential solutions to build.
Market Risk is basically, "will anyone buy this?" Product Risk is, "can this be built?"
Most solutions are a mix of both, and your job is figuring out what to work on is to eliminate as much risk as you can and then move forward.
Also, I want to point out, there is a possibility you aren't passionate about a problem in scratching your own itch. But there is also a possibility you aren't excited about something you're solving for someone else!
I actually took some time to collect my thoughts on problem finding after being inspired by this thread. These are some examples of things I have done in the past, and continue doing. I hope this helps you as well as others.
https://medium.com/@scottworks/5-ways-to-find-problems-like-a-pro-7673025d0e47
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
Read this, I am sure you will find your solution.
https://qr.ae/TWnttA