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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

My trick has always been to solve one of my own problems, and be my own first customer. Then I know it works, and meets the goals of the audience. I figure that if I need the problem solved, so do other people, but even if nobody else ever shows up, I got my own value from it.

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The problem is polish, documentation, marketing, promotion.

There's plenty of stuff that i've made that's useful in the form of an inelegant API that i don't mind using. But to build a polished product with documentation, a marketable presentation, analyze what you offer that the competition does not, getting people interested, blogging about it, is quite a lot more perspiration.

Writing a useful MVP is necessary, but often the easiest part. Most ideas dont fall under "if you build it and they will come".

Totally agree. Building a usable, shippable, commercial grade product and actually getting people to pay you money for it is quite an ordeal. An enormous amount of attention needs to be paid to get a product nobody cares about installed, even for free. Even after the sale, you have to provide support which will run at a loss until you reach a customer threshold.

The SaaS and subscription model evens out the revenue spikes, but you still have to make the sales.

A salesman, I am not. I suppose I should learn how to do it, but I don't have much passion for the sales side of business.

This is usually why you need 2 people. Someone to build the product and someone to sell the product. There'd be no Jobs without Woz and vice versa. Exceptions to this are unicorns. It's not surprising that the presence or absence of co-founders is a strong signal to investors.

I thought the only down-to-earth meaning of unicorn was a startup with a $1B+ valuation, regardless of the number of co-founders, no? [1] Your statement "There'd be no Jobs without Woz and vice versa. Exceptions to this are unicorns." seems to indicate a restriction to one founder for unicorns.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_(finance)

There can be multiple species of unicorn.

No, another common use 2-3 years ago was a single person who could accomplish disparate (founder) roles, such as design + code or sales + code. "Unicorn" is still used for various types of rare events.

Or maybe you could actually just ship a FOSS product so that if people are interested they can hire you or pay you (or your company) to get more good stuff ?

FOSS folks probably wouldn't like my stuff. It's Windows based.

I'm struggling with finding a problem I have myself that isn't already solved a thousand times. As a software developer it's not so easy, as software developers tend to solve their own problems very quickly =)

My hobbies so far haven't translated neatly into side projects, but I guess I just need to get more creative.

Solution: create a platform where users can submit their problems, and developers can take inspiration and build solutions :)

The main problem of such a platform would be the signal to noise ratio. I imagine majority of submissions would go in the direction of "faster horses" and "X, but better".

Just make sure you weight the opportunity costs, meaning your time might be better spent on something else. If you are an highly skilled and productive software engineer you are one in a million, and fixing one of your problems, even a very hard one, might only end up being useful for a tiny group of people.

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