What is a major problem or pain in your business that you would pay to fix?
I am looking to build my next product and while I am interested in several areas it might be good to hear about real problems people face in their day to day business. Maybe there are good ideas for a product there that might be worth building.
When I was making money from advertising via Indie Hackers, I wished there was some product that made the whole process easier. I had to spend lots of time seeking out sponsors, explaining the offer to them, going back and forth on copy/images/scheduling/prices/etc, then implementing the ads and remembering to take them down when they were done. I came very close to building my own tool to make this all a lot easier.
Hi, was wondering how you felt about google ads? And what sort of features would differentiate this platform from it? Thanks
Google AdSense is not custom. It's all automated. That means several things:
By the time I sold to Stripe, I was doing close to $6k/mo in ad revenue. If I'd been using AdSense instead, I'd be lucky to be making 1/10th of that.
I wasn't interested in automating the entire process away, because there are certain points where my involvement made things far better. Rather, I wanted a specific set of tools that would make the process easier and more efficient for all parties.
Mike from Startups for the Rest of Us has a tool that does something similar I believe:
https://bluetick.io/about/
Does something similar already exist? I know of wordpress plugins that manage ads to some degree. I don't have experience with how sites manage their ads in general. Would love to chat about this to understand it better.
So a podcast ad exchange?
I think you asked this question in the wrong place. Most people here are developers looking to start their own side project or they run one. If they had a big pain worth making a business, probably they already tackle it or put it on their backlog.
I found that all markets where developers have quick access or where developers feel pain are pretty crowded...for the simple scratch-your-own-itch reason.
If you want to go this route by asking directly the question on a public forum, I suggest finding some forums on niche, non-sexy markets for developers, there is tons of potential.
I'm telling this because 5 years ago I was in the same situation and my product was almost an instant success, just because I had almost no competition or they were awful. Now I'm in a more "friendly" market with high quality competitors and it's 10x times harder.
There is a ton of need on the regulatory compliance side of business. I have been working in the industry since 2005 and I built several internal custom systems for which a good solution did not exist.
The problem with this Industry is that people will not talk about problems openly.
How do you mean? I've recently started working with a product called ZenGRC (https://reciprocitylabs.com/product/). I have experience with compliance issues in both fintech and healthcare, too.
I mean, if a company is deficient in some way, they will not publicly discuss It especially online. Regulators will use it against them
So how do you go about extracting that information from them?
I imagine it requires a lot of trust building
Conventions and meeting up for drinks afterwards is what many people have told me works
Is there anyone you know who would like to talk privately about the problems?
I do not know anyone that would talk openly about the biggest problems. I did have a connection to one friend that had some insight into one aspect. I am still looking for that answer.
I have been a subscriber to Cory's OppsDaily for sometime, and if you read enough of the daily emails, you can sometimes spot patterns related to this industry.
I would be very interested to talk to someone who knows about the problems there. I find marketing any solution is hard unless you know who you are marketing it to, especially if it is not a "scratch your own itch" kind of thing. In this case I have no clue about the problems so would need help.
I could talk with you about industry problems in general in the topics I have experience with
This site launched recently to list opportunities for products to build. You might want to have a look there. YMMV, but there seem to be some legit needs there. https://www.oppslist.com/search
Thanks - I tried but never got connected to anyone. It also seems new opps have not been added in a while :(
Awww that's a bummer. Seemed like it had promise. But if it's just a bunch of unqualified gibberish that's just a time suck. It's not easy connecting the "people with needs" to the "people who build things" it seems. Many people have tried. So often it's an awareness issue (like, 10 apps already exist that solve it but user doesn't know), or it's a communication issue (people not quite understanding how to describe what they need).
It'd be nice to verify an email address and notify me if there is a problem with it.
For example, if someone signs up for my service with jason@gmmail.com (notice the two Ms), this email might not bounce back, but it's wrong and they won't receive my automated confirmation email to them (since it should be jason@gmail.com).
I have to catch this manually with my own eye. Maybe there's already a solution for this I'm unaware of.
Bonus points if the service could also give me some information related to that email address it verifies. Social media profiles, demographic info and things like that.
Hey Jonathan, it doesn't find related information but here's a front-end library that corrects email addresses: https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck
If the user types john@gnail.com it will say 'Did you mean john@gmail.com?'
It can hook up right into your form.
I think FullContact has that service (with correction + social profiles, etc). https://www.fullcontact.com/developer/docs/email-verification/
Yeah this seems to do a lot of what Jonathan was asking.
Also - your app setlistic is cool :)
Thanks for checking it out! :-)
This looks great! Thank you.
Calculating churn correctly is quite hard. I would pay some amount of money to make that easier.
What about Baremetrics? Out of the box: https://demo.baremetrics.com/stats/user-churn
+1
Baremetrics is nice.
I do agree churn is a bit weird to calculate.
We don't use Stripe.
what do you use?