Ask HN: What's your problem? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your problem?

28 pointskez47 comments

In the spirit of identifying niches that HNers could develop products and services around, I'd like to ask what your problems are.

I'm guessing the majority of readers here are not self-employed or actively working on startups, and most niche-identifying-problems stem from the work place. I'll start...

I want to be able to scribe meeting notes and have them recorded digitally for circulation to colleagues and CRM systems. This could take the form of a printed note-taking template, where by OCR could determine different sections (attendees, date, actions, notes) when scanning them in. It is not good etiquette (here) to scribe notes on a laptop during a meeting, and typing them up by hand is very time consuming.

What are your problems?

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My problems? Okay, I'll try to list them honestly. Try to build some startups from this:

1) It's too cold in Moscow. The gray sky sucks.

2) I fall sick easily. Now slowly recovering from a brutal case of stomatitis.

3) I can't easily find new people to play music together in a casual setting. I'd do this every couple days if it were simple.

4) Whenever I have >1 concurrent girlfriend, I have trouble separating them. Shutting off the phone sucks. Three girls at once give me so many worries that I wonder why I even bother.

5) Getting visas to foreign countries sucks, and air tickets are too expensive. Okay I can live with the ticket prices - my salary is high enough - but the visa humiliations are too much for me. You Americans have no idea.

6) The Flash platform is really poorly documented around the edges. I'd love to see something like quirksmode.org for Flash.

7) I can't seem to wake up early.

Whenever I have >1 concurrent girlfriend, I have trouble separating them.

I have a vision. A vision of the first screenplay ever to be based on a bestselling iPhone application.

"Three girl(friends)s at once..."

This is a problem? :-) There are actually several web applications to help people get into that sort of situation.

Seriously, doesn't caller ID help this situation? Maybe you could convince them all to download a location-based app so you can track them and see when two are headed to your apartment at the same time.

If they find out, it most certainly is a problem.

Well at least number 3 can be fixed...

I fall sick easily. Now slowly recovering from a brutal case of stomatitis.

I've actually got a website for this one. But I still need to learn a programming language to write an app to go with it. :(

Would a good CRM program help with the girls? You could maybe use a good forecasting and sales feature to line up new ones.

Problems faced by the denizens of this site are more likely to be well-served by what already exists.

Try asking people in industries that rarely interface with the tech world. That's where you find the big, underserved problems.

Which industries would that be? What is a good way to get in touch with them without looking too opportunist or ruining yourself? (genuine question)

Go work in them.

Most of us could probably spend a single day in the office of a company in a different industry and pick out a handful of ideas on ways they could improve their processes, or speedup tasks, or cutout waste. Not all of those ideas will require a technology-based solution, but surely a few of them will.

If you really want to find good problems to solve, try working as a temp for a few weeks. Ask lots of questions and make notes, I'm sure you'll find plenty of work to do.

Maybe that's a good startup idea right there; build a site where businesses can post their problems, procedures, workflows, painpoints, etc, and professionals can comment on them, offer suggestions, either using existing solutions (technical or not), or try to make business connections ("we can build that for you").

"Go work in them" can be a time consuming process. I wish it was possible to just work a couple of days in a given industry but it's much easier said then done. An alternative could be consulting but that can also involve a lot of commitment when all you really want is identifying opportunities - not build a consultancy biz from scratch.

Perhaps, a viable alternative could be to offer free consulting: much easier to land contracts and low commitment.

'Maybe that's a good startup idea right there; build a site where businesses can post their problems, procedures, workflows, painpoints, etc, and professionals can comment on them, offer suggestions, either using existing solutions (technical or not), or try to make business connections ("we can build that for you").'

I think it's a good idea but don't you think most businesses would be reluctant to show their problems to the web world?

Plus I think you would be inundated with a bunch of unique one-off problems that while technically could be solved/improved via a tech solution, lacks the footprint to make it worth anyone's time.

It sounds obvious, but go out and talk to people. As a slowly reforming introvert, just sitting down and talking to a random person can do crazy things to the way you think.

Absolutely. Most people just go about their lives without continuously looking for new ways to do things. Find these people and extract their domain knowledge.

Certain large, critical organizations that I work with have a paperwork process that goes:

1) Receive information through web form or email

2) Print it out

3) Scan it in to document management system.

There are whole offices of people whose job it is to do this.

Hey there, you're stealing my idea :P

Actually, that one is a good one.

I'll add my own problem: paperwork. The organization I work for has lots of seemingly useless paperwork, but it cannot be automated because of the legal requirements - we NEED to have paper signatures of customers' contracts.

That said, we're looking into minimizing it as much as possible - if only there was a widely recognized and legally accepted electronic equivalent to the signature, we could automate most of the process :(

I want to program the iPhone/iPad, but don't want all the headaches required for this:

   - Buying a Mac dev box
   - Learning Objective C
   - Dealing with the whole Apple Developer's Program paper shuffle

Objective C isn't really that hard if you already know C. I find it a lot more pleasant to use than, say, C++.

I'm going through the same process right now.

I've just bought a Mac Mini + Magic Mouse + VGA Adapter + AppleCare for £700. I've got a decent monitor, KVM switch and keyboard already.

I'm going over my K&R book at the moment, running through all of the exercises — especially pointers.

Once I've finishes with K&R my plan is to go through 'Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X' by Hillegass. Aiming for a completion date around the end of March. After that my iPhone development begins as I should have a decent foothold over core Mac programming and will, hopefully, only need to fill in a few blanks using the online references.

Surely the fix for this is called Android?

Instead of writing code in Objective C, you can try to use something like PhoneGap( http://phonegap.com/ ). Though I'm not sure if it's suitable for making games and other graphic intensive stuff.

I have a big procrastination problem. An effective tool/strategy/app for reducing this procrastination could be massively useful to me.

This is a part of the problem. You are not going to see an improvement if you don't face your problem. Stop seeking an escape strategy and come to grips with procrastination.

One strategy is to get a routine. I can't confirm though, I'm also a procrastinator :/.

My problem is time. I am still a student in India where you have one exams after another and all on completely different levels. I want to do what I love with programming and be part of projects which interest me, whose products I use (best example would be Ubuntu), but I know if I start, I will only be able to do it for a couple of weeks and then its back to studying something totally unrelated. This on and off sessions keeps me totally out of shape for programming as I am not able to get good practice. I eagerly wait for the day when I am free to do what I love indefinitely.

Make this use case easier, or just parts of it; for all critical IT infrastructure that isn't core to my business:

I'm looking for a wiki program to run. I want to force people to login before they can read any of the wiki (it's for internal use). It also needs to support LDAP.

Currently, I load up Wikipedia and find their table (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software). I can then take that table and import it directly into a Google Spreadsheet, which lets me do better filtering. Hopefully the table on Wikipedia has the fields for the comparison I want. If not, I have to go and fill out the list myself (and then add it to Wikipedia). I then spend the next few days playing around with the short list until I'm satisfied with my choice; then implement.

Thats all well and good. But I'm not the IT department! Okay, as a startup, I am, but it isn't core to my business. And I feel like it has got to be a solved problem. How about for inventory tracking? A trouble ticket system? Etc.

This shouldn't be that difficult.

Asking people what they use certainly helps, but they may or may not have the same requirements.

As an app, a better way to use tables on Wikipedia would be great (especially when things are split across multiple tables as the list of wiki software is).

(I'm not affiliated, but while writing up my use case, I came across this: http://www.wikimatrix.org )

I know this is in some ways a claim to be smarter than google, but I always feel like email clients just aren't up to it.

I have some fuzzy ideas on better webmail I plan to experiment with one day.

You're not the only one: http://inessential.com/2010/01/16/email_init

Looks as though the project is going to be called 'Letters App' and the president is John Gruber.

Interesting. Looks more mac specific than I was thinking.

My musings on interesting areas:

* I don't care about IMAP/POP/all that stuff. Mail comes in via SMTP, goes out via SMTP.

* Messages go straight into postgres

* There's gold in them thar messages headers - there's a lot of structure hidden in there that gets ignored, it must be possible to do something interesting.

* GTD motivated one-message-at-a-time, file/reply/mark to reply later.

* There must be something interesting you can do with automatic email classification.

* Only client is webmail.

* Unashamed focus on people who need to manage 500 messages a day.

Failure to finish. I've had, to date, 7 ideas that, had I finished executing, I would have been first to market (in most cases, by years). I would have been beaten to market on one other product, and really close to tied with another few.

In imaginary-land, where I live, of the 7 companies I beat to market, 4 of them had million dollar + exits or acquisitions, so I COULD have been worth 45-55 million, give or take.

My number one challenge in doing anything is not having somebody else to motivate me, or even just tell me what to do. With almost everything I do, I solve the challenges first; the bits that otherwise make the product, or the bits that aren't obviously going to work... once I've built those out, the project is mentally done for me.

I will often fail to do the little things, the EASY things even, like building the change password page, or sending an email for account creation, etc. I'm so bad at it, even, that I will often stop after I have figured out HOW to solve the problems, without ever even bothering to actually implement.

So yeah, that's why I'm stuck with my 9-to-5. Good question.

You have just described me too... Countless ideas started and very few completed or even got to a launchable status. I know exactly what's required in every case but struggle to wrap things up.

Funnily enough, I think I'd make a solid startup/side-project coach and it's exactly what I need, also. Would love to see a small group work together to motivate each other, like an online version of the YC dinners (going by what I've read of them on here).

I have the same problem. I find it difficult to keep up the motivation to do the boring work that makes the difference between cool side project and actual product. I think this in large part is because I do things alone, because I don't have a problem with day-to-day drudgery in my day job.

Of course, I wouldn't be fiddling around with new product ideas if I was satisfied with the day job either.

I'd definitely be into the small group idea - it would have to be quite a bit smaller and non-public than HN though :-)

I'd also be interested in something like that.

maybe we need to make a new website? ;)

Hopefully none of the participants of this thread take on the task. ;-)

Yes, a private group to share ideas and motivation could be useful and I'd be willing to be involved. Could be very low-tech too - just IM/email and some FrieNDAs.

I'd like to share two techniques I've found somewhat helpful (though not quite the ultimate answer, unfortunately).

1. While side projects often have no deadlines and thus less motivation, employees don't really have the same problems. I've delegated more components from side projects to my employees and the result is things getting done much faster. Now the progress block is things that are back in my hands - writing content, taking a working product and launching it for people to try.

2. A while back, an entrepreneur-type I know over the net and I did an experiment. We would both work all day and struggle with motivation to complete site-projects during the evening so we decided we'd each complete a small site project in one week. Each morning, we'd check in to show our progress. Failure to show progress meant the other person was to apply guilt trips were appropriate. Monday night as planning, Tuesday was fleshing out content, Wednesday was a skeletal site, Thursday was putting things together, Friday was polishing and making it live. Each night, the pressure of thinking you'd have nothing to show the following morning was enough to force productivity. On nights when I'd normally laze around or procrastinate at the desk, I'd cram 1-2 hours of work around or after midnight. It was enough to get a basic site rolling by the Friday that I would never have otherwise done. It worked for me but unfortunately the other guy didn't get going quite as well. Still, I'd do it again.

Are you spying on me ? :D

Perhaps you can learn something from this. A software tester friend of mine couldn't figure out how to start a business doing software test, so he fell back on what else he knew: construction. He started a side business doing small jobs: small decks, internal walls, installing dishwashers & appliances etc. This was all stuff he could do in his free time after work and he hoped to move from that to larger construction projects.

The overriding complaint he heard from his clients about other contractors was not that their work was bad, or that their prices were high or didn't match what they quoted, but rather it was that they just never showed up!

Simply by making appointments and actually showing up to quote the job or to do the work, he got tons of business.

Thanks to a habit of bad posture I'm very limited in how much work I can do. But terse code is often incomprehensible and English can't be compressed too much either. I want a way to reliably code/write without using my hands, and/or to minimise the number of input gestures I need to do.

I am bilingual (french/english), but one thing really bothers me: I never get to speak in English. I read books in English, I watch movies in English, I read/write in English, etc. but I never get the chance to practice my spoken English. The end result is that although I understand/write English very well, I lack confidence when talking. I wish I could _talk_ on the net so that I "get" the accent and intonation. The best scenario would be to be able to discuss about things I'm interested in at the same time (startups, programming, etc.). I could actually host a Ventrilo server (anyone interested?) until someone builds an app for that :D

I should move to a country where English is spoken by most people. I was in the same situation one year ago before moving to Netherlands. You will never completely loose your french accent (hey they said it's sexy :) ), but you will improve a lot your vocabulary and your confidence in talking (especially after work and a few beers :)).

This just posted on nytimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/technology/personaltech/28...

I would highly recommend playing online video games with voice chat. With almost any game you choose, you'll find a mature group of individuals that play casually and would enjoy chatting with you.

That's what I used to do actually. It was indeed a very effective way to speak English but I pretty much lost interest in video games now.

I want to read a Jquery book... I didn't succeed yet, I'm building a $20K project with that thing called Jquery, but it seems that I need to read something like 500 pages before being able to parse the DOM with ease.

I need to read it quickly, the project need to be complete within 1 month... or I'LL DIE :'( :'(

I need a web based wiki/concept-map hybrid.

Personally, I have no significant problems that can be solved with technology.

However if you look around, there are far better places to go looking to solve problems then HN. The recession is plush with opportunity. Not just opportunity to help someone with some insignificant problem, but to truly help someone live better. Personally, I am doing pretty well but when i go back to the place where I grew up everywhere I look I see unemployment especially in young people in their 20's. I've spent a great deal of thought towards analyzing why this is. I've come to many conclusions, but in the end I think its an education system that prepared a large body of students for work in industry that was lifted up and handed to computers. So now there is at least one town (and I would imagine there are more) where there are young people eager to find a job. I feel like the internet is a great solution, the local economy may be devastated but the global economy probably still has something for them. Sites like etsy are one step towards this direction. I think if you can find something more specialized, with the principle of self employment. you have something special.

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