Pain Points That I Would Pay a SaaS Product to Resolve
Hi everyone,
As I am building different projects, I found that I have a few pain points that I am not interested in building solutions for by myself but I would pay someone else to solve. I wanted to throw them out there and see if it interests anyone.
If there are good solutions for these already, let me know.
I am happy to either act as a customer advisor to give feedback on what would solve my pain point or even team up with someone as a commercial co-founder.
1) Course curator
I try to learn a lot of skills online (e.g. animation making, drawing). However, most Youtube videos or SkillShare are very brief. I don't find the instructions long and deep enough. My fiancee, who is trying to improve her illustration skills feels the same way. I don't like MOOCs because they are too lecture-y and academic. I don't like the quality of stuff on Udemy. The kinds of classes or programs that I want to find are these (I can't share links directly because I am quite new to IH):
- Animators Guild Animation Class
- Sales for Founders
- Draw a Box
There is no way for me to find these unless I spent a long time on Google. And, even when I find these, I don't know how they compare to others.
I would love to have something like Class Central that curates deeper, longer classes. For example, I would pay $10 for a trustworthy curation of best animation classes online.
2) Book database and reading community
I have been using Goodreads for a very very long time. I have 2100+ books that I labelled as to-read. I trust the ratings and generally like the reviews. However,
I would love to have a community around books that I am interested in. Often, I don't have many people I can discuss the books with. I would be willing to write more reviews if I knew more people who would read my reviews. I would also like to meet with people whose book taste overlaps with mine. I would pay $30+/yr for such a platform. (If it could mix my movie and book preferences, that's even better. If there was a way to
I would love to have service that I pay monthly and receive one of the books on my wishlist (or to-read list) - potentially mixed with above-mentioned community idea.
Goodreads' recommendation system is very poor. I would pay someone to send me to properly recommend me new books or let me know new releases.
3) Self-therapy video journaling
I found that when I feel anxious, depressed, or stressed, the most effective way for me to intervene is to record a selfie video of talking through what is going through my mind. Just seeing myself, helps me get out of my head very quickly.
It is similar to what is being described on a paper called "Seeing Is Believing: Using Video Feedback in Cognitive Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder"
Currently, I use iPhone's Camera to record these sessions. But, I pour my heart out and these videos get lost in between the other stuff. I don't even really know how to find those videos in between others.
I would pay $30+/yr for an app where
- I could record these sessions
- I was sure about its privacy
- These sessions were automatically transcribed and emotionally analyzed using AI
- I was reminded to record new sessions from time to time
I am not even sure writing these out like this will interest anyone. Depending on the response I can share other pain points that I am willing to pay for.
I'm honestly pretty interested in the video journaling idea and I think it would relatively simple to build a prototype for it (emotional sentiment analysis of the video would be a little more difficult). But the actual service of allowing recording, organizing and storing the journals to watch back later is pretty straight forward.
I'd love to get some more thoughts about what you/others would really want out of a video journaling app. I haven't video journaled but can definitely see the value compared to traditional journaling (which I do now) and I think I'm going to try and start it! Maybe Ill enjoy it enough to convince me to build this!
I think one of the biggest issues people would have with building these tools is that you just gave them a good reason not to.
The amount you'd be willing to pay isn't going to cut it to make it worth someones time to build it. ~$2.50/month ($30/year) doesnt even cover the hosting bill, let alone the development, marketing and personal time needed to build these.
For something like the course creation you'd be making money by using the service, so a higher monthly fee (i.e $30+/month) isnt at all unacceptable if the product solves a problem.
Yeah, I agree. As a single customer, my business wouldn't be able to cover even the smallest costs. You would probably need 1,000+ people like me to make this a viable project.
However, if there are even 10-20 other customers to get this project started, I think these initial customers can help an indie hacker get something moderately-promising off the ground.
Hey Sarbak, I like the idea of course curators but I think the main difficulty in starting something like that and competing with Udemy is how to vet courses. I wouldn't know anything about "Animators Guild Animation" and would need to probably hire a specialist or get someone else's recommendation on it. Either there would be an upfront cost on domain expertise or have users create share reviews, as Udemy has it. Was wondering what your thoughts on finding the technical/financial challenge of using proper domain expertise recommendations.
@sarbak definitely some interesting ideas. I'm building a course on 'Sales for Founders.' Can you help me understand why do you want to learn that course? What are the challenges you are facing while doing sales?
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@kdme I would recommend making a rule that you can only record positive things in your video journal. I am going to try this too. It’s so easy to doubt yourself when you are starting something new. Stay positive and good luck!
Yeah, video journaling is very powerful. I think your negative experience is proof of how powerful it can be. I have studied different psychotherapy methods for fun and I have been regularly journaling for 10+ years, so I have built some heuristics to make it a constructive exercise.
One trick is to talk about how you are feeling in the moment, trying to articulate it for an outsider to understand while looking into the eyes of the person in the video (i.e. you), and, when needed, letting awkward silences to happen. That helps a lot with developing empathy for yourself and get perspective on what's going on around you.
I think, for someone who does a lot of socially isolated, stressful, ambiguous mental work, things can easily get overwhelming and confusing. Trying harder sometimes makes things spiral out of control even more and immediately finding someone trustworthy and empathetic to talk to can be hard. Journaling generally helps but video journaling is a whole new level.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago