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Comment by ageitgey | Hacker News Reader

The world is full of people in your situation who's main area of interest and experience is primarily in software development or start-ups. Because of this, almost every good idea that touches your entire realm of experience been attempted 10 times. There's tons of competition even for really bad ideas - just look at how many start-ups in SF tried to offer "laundry as a service"!

The secret is to go out and make friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience. The world is full of profitable niche industries that need custom solutions that software developers have no idea exist. The business and industrial world largely still runs on excel spreadsheets, emails and word docs. Those are all areas ripe for new products and many of the top companies in those niche areas have no idea how to apply technology to solve their problems more efficiently.

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> The secret is to go out and make friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience.

I'd slightly rephrase this: make friends who are business owners in different industries.

Having a good idea is only the first step. You need to be able to market it, and ultimately sell it.

Business owners face business problems, will have an idea on how much they're willing to spend on it, and will understand the budgets and where they can be applied. Rank and file employees often do not make purchasing decisions on behalf of their companies. Some may, but most do not.

My personal story:

I became friends with the owner of a nearby gym, and I was immediately impressed with how he ran his business, and more importantly his ability to stay ahead of the curve, learning and adopting new ways to market his business.

For a free membership, I would do one off small projects, that typically string together API's offered by the different services he used (Scheduling, waivers, forms). None was particularly interesting, until he came up with a hodgepodge system for contacting new members.

I helped him build some flexibility, and we both came to the conclusion that if we built a platform that specifically did this, we could market it and sell it.

We boot strapped it and made about $13k in revenue the first year.

Now that we have a viable business, we've shifted to growth: get customers.

“I would slightly rephrase this: make friends who are business owners in different industries.”

I find it difficult to put in place a process to consistently meet business owners.

Some ideas: - going to meetups or better organizing one - going to conferences or better give a talk - be part of mastermind groups (but dont know where to find good one) - hang out on entrepreneur communities like indiehackers.

Other ideas?

Go to tradeshows or conventions. They are the biggest concentration of business owners anywhere.

Thanks for sharing your experience, that sounds awesome!

>The secret is to go out and make friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience.

Great advice, my SO works outdoors doing field studies and the amount of shit they talk about doing manually is astounding. They pay people (or sometimes unpaid interns) to go through hours of videos documenting everything they see! Almost all cataloging and measurements are done with little to no technology. Another example; I volunteer for a program that does some human intake and processing, before I got there everyone used a series of paper forms that got updated by work of mouth. Now? Google Spreadsheets.

There's hundreds of industries, organizations, and groups that do extremely manual labor intensive work because it hasn't even occurred to them it can be automated or turned in to a service, but you'll never meet them if you hang around tech people all the time because the solution is always on their mind.

I still remember this guy:

> I work at NASA creating procedures for spacewalks (EVAs).

> Currently we write these procedures in Microsoft Word.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5585535 (2013)

Hm, I wonder if they changed the system by now?

edit: Seems like there was still work to be done 3 years ago at least..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080941 (2016)

Nope, we're still using the same system. Wow...the first time I mentioned that here was 2013. Ouch. It's something I've wanted to work on all this time but just haven't been able to fit it in. Some students used it as a group project [1] last semester, though, and another group of students may pick it up this semester...so I'm hopeful.

[1] https://github.com/jamesmontalvo3/spacewalk

Yes, that's my experience as well. Once you step out of tech bubble you'll encounter countless small and even mid-sized businesses that could greatly benefit from rather simple CRUD apps and solutions that might seem very obvious to you.

Or in other, more specific words (and I have no affiliation with the product): Showing them how to use something like Airtable and setting up a simple template for them could change their world.

Ha! I did a webapp just for tagging observation videos. This is for my SO college students, they were doing it in excel. It's a big headache for maintenance, but it probably saved her students alot of time

There are niche apps that do it but they charge a high fee to the college. Case you are wondering:

https://observideo.com

You use “the world is full” twice. First to describe the high supply of software developers looking for projects and second to describe the high demand for said services.

So why hasn’t supply met demand? Why isn’t the market working more efficiently?

There can be various explanations for that, obviously, including the lack of information you hint at (“secret”, “have no idea”), but Occam's Razor would suggest we examine the assumptions first.

I’m not so sure that there is such a strong demand side in this market.

I think part of the issue is that the software startup playbook is not as generalizable as its advocates suggest it is, and an under-emphasis on domain expertise vs software expertise

For ex, in multi-stakeholder industries like healthcare where the people who pay for a product often have incentives that conflict with the incentives of the user of a product, following the North Star of "making something people want" can lead you astray. So many digital health companies make products no one will pay for, or that end up in a narrow consumer lifestyle niche instead of actually improving healthcare in a meaningful way. A team of engineers / data scientists who "follow the user" isn't enough. It isn't even enough to focus on physicians. You really need to talk to administrators and see how the sausage is made

Not sure why this comment is being downvoted, it's a good point. The GP includes this quote, echoing many other people I've encountered who build software:

> The business and industrial world largely still runs on excel spreadsheets, emails and word docs. Those are all areas ripe for new products and many of the top companies in those niche areas have no idea how to apply technology to solve their problems more efficiently.

Spreadsheets are incredibly useful tools! They're general-purpose, easy to use and powerful. Millions of people use them for programming without even knowing it.

Email is still great for communicating! It's everywhere, it's easy to use and it's totally interoperable. How many startups are building decentralized communication tools right now? Email has been federated for decades.

The notion that use of these tools is an opportunity for some more efficient proprietary solution is a bad assumption. People use them because they're good and they work. The parent is right: there's less demand than you think.

While using those tools isn't a sure sign of an opportunity, I've rarely met someone running their business on spreadsheets that didn't wish they had some extra functionality or ability to scale up larger. Sure, some are plenty happy with Excel and email, but there are just as many that would pay for something better if it existed or if they knew about it.

Lots of things are worth applying some automation to, but not worth enough to pay someone to provide as a service.

There's strong demand at a competitive price point and acceptable license terms.

Even though many software companies and startups are trying to push SaaS software "rental" terms, many of the market participants are looking for a one-time purchase more similar to "ownership"

Well I will doubt the supply side. I think it's a simpler assertion, because I know so few nerds.

I think if you live in silicon valley, you have a distorted view of how many people can build software.

I grew up in the mid-south and know of literally one or two other people that code.

I know live in a major metro area and still only know maybe 3 people that code. It is actually a rare skill.

At the same time, I can't even count how many contractors, real estate agents, sales and marketing, and doctors and lawyers that I know.

everyone from high school is a real estate agent

Global dev population is 20M. If the global workforce is 4B people, that's 5 per thousand. Not much indeed.

> almost every good idea that touches your entire realm of experience been attempted 10 times

I strongly disagree with the implied defeatism here. There have been many attempts and many failures with many popular ideas for non-obvious reasons, and it is worth being #11 if you can A) identify why the previous attempts failed, and B) find a different angle that avoids the issues.

The original poster is a college student looking for a side project to do in their spare time. It's not defeatism to suggest that they should probably look for side project ideas first in low-competition areas rather than in very competitive areas where multiple teams of experienced people have already failed.

Of course if they have a specific insight into a business that has failed ten times that they think is a major differentiator, then of course they should investigate that first. But then they wouldn't be posting on a forum for business ideas :)

100%.

Google wasn't the first search engine. But they were effectively the last. First to market is only important insofar as it's correlated with making sticky products, building a moat, and not dying. That's what you actually want.

Hmm. I switched successfully to duckduckgo...

Fair enough, but Google has made their mission about making the world's information accessible, moreso than being the best search engine; I assume you still use YouTube, perhaps you use Google Maps (although there are plenty of good navigation alternatives), perhaps you use Google Translate, etc.

> I assume you still use YouTube

An aside, but funny enough, one thing I like about DDG is how much better it is at finding YouTube videos. I assume Google is encumbered by antitrust fears or something when it comes to video search.

I’m not sure it’s a complete aside. What you’re describing is the general recipe that business school warns against for entrenched industries. That is to say, if you give up low margin products, you give an inroad for competitors to gain competancy and scale. Rebar in the steel industry is sort of the hallmark example. Even though search is still an important part of their ad income, I don’t see google’s dominance in search lasting another 100 years, since there will continue to be smaller competitors who excell in some small low margin area and it will slowly chip away at their brand.

When you put it like that, suddenly it starts to make a lot more sense to me why Google seemingly relinquishes projects to their graveyard; they probably have a lot of competitors for each abandoned project that do the same thing as well, or better. It would be nice if Google had a default policy of allowing exports of stored data to said competitors, though..

I don't think it's defeatism because what GP seems to point out is OP needs to expand his experience pool to see the low hanging fruits that reside outside of the software world.

I think there is also a C) You might just be lucky when the other guys weren't. Sometimes, luck is as much a factor as hard work.

Also, there are tons of VC backed startups that "failed" because they couldn't squeeze enough profit out of their niche to pay for their exorbitant and lavish burn rate. A one-man, or very small team can find great profit where some of these bloated startups have failed.

del.icio.us vs pinboard.in

the mistake is to think that others have failed because they were not good enough. If 10 people tried before and failed, you can be darn sure that there's a good reason for those failures, and it's not lack of ability. When it comes to online software products, businesses always fail due to 2 problems: #1 no one wanted the product (or not enough) or #2 cost of acquiring customers was too high. These aren't going to be solved with better code.

Key word: product market fit

The product has to be good enough to solve the problems of the market. #2 is also a downside of this - you can't dump marketing money to get around PMF.

Facebook is an interesting company which had a poor market (people are fine without it) but they managed to improve the product, the economics, the scale, just enough, and ended up one of the biggest companies in the world.

But, we're in established markets now. People have been using FB and many other sites for many years now and those behaviors are very much ingrained in people. There are only so many hours in a day someone can be online, so to some degree all new applications are competing with FB and the other incumbent apps. It's much much harder today than 10 or 15 years ago.

Established markets still need PMF. And existing sites/apps can lose their PMF.

There's a large demand for, say, a more privacy based social networking website. Or a gaming based social networking site, like what FB-Zynga used to be.

Google has a large blind spot too. Yelp is filling one, Pinterest covers their image search weakness, tons of travel apps/sites are filling another. But there's many, many things that can be more localized or made into a niche.

I'm not sure if it is harder, as technology has significantly improved. I think we're at the stage where less of the effort is building/designing an app, and more of it is in better product development.

The secret is to go out and make friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience.

I agree with this, but I'd add one more point. In addition to face-to-face time with these people (which can be hard to come by, either on your end or on theirs), you can try to learn about other industries by reading their books, whitepapers, journals, etc., watching their videos, documentaries, etc., and following industry trade magazines, analyst reports, and the like. This stuff you can at least do on your own time, late at night or on the weekends, whenever you have time to spare.

Given this kind of research, you can put together a tentative "value hypothesis" regarding a potential solution in some other space. Then you can maximize the value of your face-to-face time with other people by talking through a specific hypothesis, instead of just an open-ended fishing expedition.

Of course, if somebody is willing to give you a half day of their time, and you have that half day free, then go for it. But generally, people are more open to sharing their time if you can make it clear that you respect their time and that the interaction will be somewhat directed / focused.

I’ve thought about doing this sort of thing, but co-opt a friend/colleague/someone your husband knows as the SME in the different industry.

You need the insight in to that industry — by definition, you don’t have it. So find that person, and don’t just take their idea and leave. Work with them. Have them be the champion in the industry for this thing you make. Who knows best where the thing can be sold? They do!

I would add to that though, that while they are the expert in their industry, you would be surprised how experts can have blinders on regarding inefficiencies. So don't be afraid to ask questions and pitch ideas. I have seen plenty of experts that don't recognize huge pain points in their own industry because that's just the way it's always been done. You can be an expert in something, but if you aren't also an expert in software, you likely haven't thought of all the possibilities that software could solve for you.

Not that I want to be anti-innovation, but what if spreadsheets allow the user to be more in control, have more flexibility and avoid monthly payments of 3-5 cloud services? Maybe replacing every spreadsheet is not optimal.

Airtables is a good example, though -- I'm seriously thinking of creating an OSS version of Airtables, that has more field types -- like being able to edit using Markdown... or join across bases, not just tables.. There's SO much more you could do w/ their tech, and blocks should be free - just they should have a marketplace and take a cut of sales--something like shopify... if I OSS'd it, I'd do some hybrid like wordpress does, but require a % on anything in the 'app store' -- but all core features would be free / foss.

would be amazing!

Features I'd like to build into it: Bubble like app from spreadsheets. Hosted and oss version. Extra types: json, md, xml, etc. Time tracker.

This is horrible advice. You're positing that there is no room for innovation within the software development domain. This is a stupid assertion.

This is great advice.

Is this just your "reasonable sounding opinion" or have you yourself had any success in doing what the OP is asking about? Or are you yourself sitting in a comfortable office job in "business and industry"?

> The business and industrial world largely still runs on excel spreadsheets, emails and word docs.

Why assume that changing this hasn't been "attempted 10 times"? Perhaps the reason for that is simply opaque to you and as a software developer you think in terms of software solutions. However, getting these solutions sold is the real problem.

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