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Comment by noobhacker | Hacker News Reader

Vincent says that building a solo business requires you to work on a boring idea, i.e. something everyone already knows the value proposition of, e.g. punch card on computer.

How does one learn about these "mundane" issues that small business owners face? The examples I've seen from Vincent / Patrick McKenzie (patio11) are happenstance (e.g. I happen to hang out in this community, so I know). Like many of us here, I'm an engineer in a tech company and does not naturally have small business owners in my circle.

So what's an efficient way to reach out and understand small businesses' problems? Online forums (which one?), local business associations?

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Hi I'm the guy in the interview.

I actually have a lot of thoughts about this that are hard to condense, so I'll just say this: curiosity isn't a personality trait. People tend to model curiosity as just something you "have" or not, but curiosity is actually a function of knowledge you already have. You can only really be curious about things that are adjacent to things that you already know about. I would say the best way to find ideas is to just do a lot of different things. There's no formula, but you can maximize your odds by just learning about as many different kinds of things as possible.

The best problems to solve are the ones you experience on a day to day basis, that you are personally invested in. That's what Vincent did here. It's much harder to build for other people because it requires a lot of user research & constant feedback & it's often difficult to even get honest feedback. The trick is recognizing a problem as worthwhile to solve.

Here are a couple of ideas from my day-to-day as a programmer:

- Code review reminder tool. Code reviews are great but there can be social friction to getting them done. I think the typical way this works is to @ mention someone which sends them an email & then ping them on slack if they don't review it w/in a certain amount of time, but I always feel at least a little bad about pinging someone on slack.

- Better software to sync local files to servers for development. A lot of devs run linux machines on aws, develop code locally, and then somehow sync their code from local to the dev server. I feel like people often just write their own scripts that amount to using rsync and some kind of system event watcher for file changes.

- More complex reminders. I want task and date specific reminders. So, for example, remembering to buy someone a gift for their birthday. I want the first reminder 3 weeks before and then a reminder everyday until I resolve.

I dunno if any of these ideas are worth solving though. I don't know if I'd pay for them..but they are things I want.

Focusing on your own day-to-day problems ends up with the various VC-funded "mom apps" to summon contractors who to come to your house, pick up your room, and do your laundry for you, make that statement old advice and not to be taken literally.

I agree that more complex reminders with the features you describe would be quite cool, for both code reviews and birthdays would be cool, but you admit that the business case isn't quite there yet. (There is a glut of reminder apps on the app store, those features probably exist between all of them.)

Better sync software falls under the category of development tools; even Visual Studio is free these days (in the form of VS Code) because selling to developers is notoriously difficult to sell software to, because they know how to code. (There is also no shortage of open source inotify+rsync based sync tools.)

I suppose it's also about broadening your own horizons so the space of problems that apply to you is a little wider than "mom apps".

Fwiw, it's also a lot easier to hate on every idea than to believe in it :-D. I'm the first to be pessimistic, but I learned that you have to try something & iterate on it even if all you can do is find fault with every idea.

These were also ideas I came up with in like 5 mins. Just showing that ideas are a dime a dozen and it takes exploration to actually find something that works.

Do you even emacs+tramp bro?

Do you have a hobby that's orthogonal to your tech career? I try to go to photowalks and photo meetups as much as I can. I end up meeting a more diverse set of people and because I'm a "techie" they'll often open up about their tech problems. Giving a few suggestions for free then provides an opportunity to ask them about how they could improve the automation in their lives.

Another option is owning a house, or taking some interest in the various maintenance folks that run an apartment building. You encounter lots of people with no systems, but not enough knowledge/time to get something working on their own. Or, even better, those that have been burned with custom shitty software. I had to get a tree trimmed and the arborist was a goldmine of information on the software available, and the problems his company had with it. Markets like these are ripe for disruption with simpler and cheaper SaaS solutions.

I've been told that opportunities are easier to spot in areas where you don't spend a lot of time.

I'm guessing that this is because you haven't already accepted the status quo in those areas, and because people with your skillset who would beat you to it may not have spent a lot of time there yet.

I think opportunities are easiest to spot in places where you are newly spending alot of time. You are quickly coming up to speed on the status quo, but haven't been inured to it yet.

You also still have this sparkling energy at all of the possibilities that can only fade with time, whether you tackle a problem in the space or not.

I feel like the opposite's true for me (sample size: 1). I spent a bunch of time in tech support, then built a bunch of tools to speed up stupid manual time-consuming stuff. That got me a promotion into programming, and now I'm out of direct contact with the day-to-day issues in support so I generally rely on support staff to make additional feature requests now.

But then, I don't tend to accept the status quo. I think there are certain personalities that never do. There's always something else to challenge/improve.

I have plenty of boring ideas in regulatory compliance that I have seen for the last 12 years.

But I have to disagree in some sense. If it is really boring, you will not have any passion or motivation to see it through.

check out what are the sw's your company is using? can you make a better version of it? what about the internal tools? your company might not be paying for it but they may be useful to other similar companies? can u create them? being in a bigger organization also gives you certain advantages whether u realize it or not is upto you. some good examples are kubernete and graphql. really big orgs had these issues and solutions way before it was realized by other medium scale enterprise.

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