I want to hear your problems to decide what to build next
Hi team 👋🏼,
after ~1 year of mandatory break due to personal reasons, I am back in the Indie Hackers game. Me and my partner in crime are trying to approach the creation of our new business the right way, starting with the definition of a problem space that we'd find interesting to tackle 🎯.
I want to hear from you: what's a problem you're missing a solution for? Which SaaS are you waking up in the morning wishing it existed ✨?
- Drop a comment in the thread below 🧵
- Write me a Twitter DM 🐥
- Schedule a meeting with me 🗓
Honestly, asking this question here is a little puzzling to me. Most IH's are on this forum because they are at the beginning or early stages of their entrepreneurial journey, and probably don't have ample cash running through their businesses. This means you're looking for ideas on what to sell people who aren't able to spend much money.
That can work for something with mass appeal, but this also is a pretty niche board and isn't likely to be reflective of issues that apply to a large audience.
A lot of the IH's here are going to want a cheaper or simpler version of existing tools that help build and grow businesses. You generally don't want to compete based on price unless you have a magic formula that keeps costs down, and your tool will inherently need to get more and more complex in order to close B2B deals.
I don't want to be a downer here and discourage discussion, but it always puzzles me when super early stage entrepreneurs try and build products for other super early entrepreneurs.
I would honestly suggest researching discussion groups for non-tech niches, particularly those related to new trends that look like they have legs. You want to find something that startup/tech people like us haven't discovered and tried to solve/monetize yet.
That’s a very good point Connor and thank you for being honest. Indeed, this is not the only branch we’re exploring, nor do I see Indie Hackers as our target audience. I do believe however that Indie Hackers are brilliant people with an open mind.
By virtue of having a finite time, entrepreneurs cannot build every good idea that solves important problems they are aware of. Hence, I think it’s still a good crowd to engage in a conversation with.
I get your point. I think OP coming from consulting background wants to help (target) IHers. My feeling on IH as well as few meetups is that most IH have some dreams and ideas but really lack the experience to execute. So that’s something OP or someone like with experience could help. Like I just wrote a simple financial modeling tool to put a layer of perspective. It helps planning, decision making, etc. I mean we all been there, work on some experimental projects or ideas that we eventually abandon. If there’s some way we kill those faster and only focus on the ones working, we would save so much time
Hi @Alienroid 👋🏼 . I am not sure if this answer your questions, but I am not necessarily targeting IHs. I want to hear from IHs as I believe we have an above average ear for capturing people’s problem but I don’t want to shortlist IHs targeted solutions just yet.
right I read your other comments after :P
I get wha you are saying. It's part of the reason I am here as well.
Awesome 😁
I have created a bootstrapper's guide and I asked Tony Dinh for some feedback. He told me that the way how he finds problems to solve is by being an active member of his community. So for example, if you are into volley ball, by playing it, watching games and participating in forums you will eventually find the problems to solve.
Find your audience and be an active member. You will find the right problems to solve
That’s a good one. Thank you @tiagorbf it will surely help!
Here's the premise for my next idea:
I don't want to spend 30m-2hrs editing cool video captions.
I want captions with cool style presets I can edit and quickly tweak and reuse that automatically sync with the video.
There are several solutions for this but they're missing the reusable customizability.
I'll reference this comment & post when I launch as this is the first time I've shared the idea publicly.
Best of luck on your indie hack.
Good luck with your idea.
I have worked on something similar at my previous employer for an iPhone app. We didn’t have templates just yet but you could easily edit all templates in one go.
Do add speech to text functionality 😊
Do add speech to text functionality - definitely. This is a core feature.
👍
Beyond the problems, do have a quick back envelop calculation on how it might work financially. Here's a small financial modeling tool I did: http://increnovation.azurewebsites.net/fermi/highlevel
Absolutely! I do have a strong Business background so that’s something we take into account when shortlisting the ONE idea to work on. We’re still in the exploring phase.
Thank you for linking your great resource
Keep me posted. I’m also interested:)
I would love a way to be able to track how my utilities are in real time.
I think there's a solution for that already. I've seen some pretty accurate tracking (I don't have it).
Is there really? Ive been looking and havent been able to find anything for that outside of a smart meter.
When I used to have solar, I was able to track major appliances.
I've seen friend's setup that tracks in pretty good details. He's pretty crazy on being carbon neutral so he has all sorts of tracking (he also crypto mines like crazy though).
ahh yea its a bit easier when you have custom infrastructure. I mean a way to do it simply by connecting with your utility.
I think that’s something hard to solve without custom hardware or suppliers’ buy-in unfortunately. Love the idea though, thank you for sharing
I think you can just track the usage at source. It’s actually a pretty easy product. You don’t need buy in from any of the individual supplier. Home power usage is quite static. It’s nothing compared to power management of cellphone.
Random Google results: https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Energy-Monitor-Electricity-Usage/dp/B075K6PHJ9
Exactly! We’re on the same page. We lack the expertise to go into custom hardware 😊
Don't worry about it. It's not that hard. But definitely it's more capital intensive investment (at least at the start).
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Do you really find 6 new ones every single day? :D Maybe the problem is then with me. I am full stack developer and I want to stop selling my services and start selling products, but it seems so hard to find a good product to start :)
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That’s an impressive feat as a one man show. Your product does stand out of the crowd in terms of how professional it looks like. Good luck on your journey!
Thanks for the feedback, and you are probably right I just need to jump into "red sea" and swim there :)
Hey, i am working on this idea. Recently launched https://prelaunchers.xyz/ to help the community by putting them all at one place for early adopters :)
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Thanks for submitting :) Approved and up on site. Always open for feedback and improvements, please feel free to reach out to me on IH or Twitter
Hey @driaug thank you for the recommendation. Let me tackle both ideas.
This sounds indeed great, but it's not something that suits what I am looking for: (i) I believe it would be really hard to monetize and (ii) it's more of an editorial effort than a technical challenge.
Again, the challenge with open-source and well-maintained is monetization. I am looking for something that I can build in public, but am more familiar with traditional business models vs. open-source.
Anything else comes to mind?
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True - thank you for pointing me to cal.com and spacedrive.com - both are good products I wasn't aware of