Ask HN: What's a good business opportunity in web apps/services today? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's a good business opportunity in web apps/services today?

2 pointsapatters5 comments

I run a small web development agency (it's 4 devs, me, and a marketing/admin person). We specialize in building web apps of moderate complexity on top of WordPress. Usually line-of-business/CRUD stuff sometimes with a few twists.

We've built up a modest cash reserve and have some resources to spare. I'd really like to start developing some intellectual property that we own and get a product to market.

If you had a little cash and a dev or three to throw at something, what would it be? The fact that our background is in WordPress biases us toward something built on that or at least in PHP, but we're all multi-language, multi-platform people so we can do anything that doesn't require a PhD really (we probably aren't going to be the next deep learning startup).

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To me it seems that the one good place to start might be with a product that solves problems for some of your existing/previous customers or for similar businesses that "could" be customers. This type of product would be something that is a natural extension of the current business, e.g. analytics, integration with AWS/cloud infrastructure, or tooling that connects the website to Microsoft Office.

The advantage of this approach is that it is easier to identify and address the problems of a specific market...and there's already a basis for a discussion and feedback on a product.

A second type of product might be based on an in-house tool, i.e. dog fooding. That's the story of products like Slack and BaseCamp. This has some of the same advantages as externally focused tooling, but leverages the existing business in a different way. It's probably easier to take shortcuts in quality here. Overfitting the solution to the problem is also easier.

Both of these are probably better than trying to solve the "internet's problem" because there's a real problem driving the first two cases and real businesses behind them.

Good luck.

You need to understand the problem that you're trying to solve, and the best way to do that is to solve something that you've faced yourself. Look at the projects you've completed recently and see where they were less than perfect. Were they late? Were they over-budget? Were they gold-plated? Did they work? Ask yourself why that happened. Then build something to solve that problem. You'll make something that will improve your business, and you might build a product that other businesses will buy.

This is how products like Trello and Pivotal Tracker came to exist.

I appreciate comments to the effect that we should look at markets we understand and problems we have solved. This is good advice and it's something we have done. We have a good list of ideas from that process.

My intent behind this question to HN though, was to get people to talk about things THEY would do. In other words, fish for stuff we haven't thought of. I want to plumb the "unknown unknowns" a bit!

Throw the cash at your husband/wife/kids instead. Seriously.

Because more things will make then happier!

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