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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

I've worked for so many companies with a really shitty tech stack. Most of the time they just threw as much mediocre devs at it until it worked. Mind you I was often one of them!

Most of their business people weren't too good either in terms of leading a company or such things, working at those companies was horrible!

The only thing they were good at was finding people with problems.

It seems to me the only thing that matters.

If you find enough people bothered by something, the will throw money at it like no tomorrow. You can't imagine how much money makes up for bad tech and shitty leadership.

But somehow this is the hardest part for me. Solving problems is one thing, but finding problems worth solving is another discipline.

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It's actually pretty hard for developers to find problems worth solving at startup scale. Your average developer doesn't encounter the kinds of problems non-tech people will pay money to solve very often. Developers are also often likely to look at a problem and come up with their own "simple" solution that non-tech people wouldn't even think of.

Dropbox is a good example here - developers were largely perfectly happy with rsync for a decade, but your run of the mill mom wanting to keep her Word documents synced at home and the office doesn't even know what Linux is, let alone how to run a terminal.

If you want to find non-b2b problems that are worth solving and which people will pay you to solve you generally have to step out of the tech bubble, talk to non-tech people at length, and imagine a solution that your mom could use.

Far and away my most common experiences with business ideas others try to give me:

"Oh man you should make an app/website to do X! God it'd make my life/job so much easier."

"Cool, yeah, great idea"

Then I unlock my phone, check the app store, and yep, there are already 25 complete solutions to this exact problem on just this one platform. Oh but they would totally pay for it and it'll definitely make me rich, never mind they haven't even bothered to google for a solution, which already exists in exactly the same form I'd make it, and is free or cheap. Ok. Toss that one in the ol' round-file.

Here it only depends on whether its a zero-sum (winner takes all) market, or whether you can improve an existing model and eat chunk of it (look how many alternatives of Mailchimp spun out, I love all of the incl. mailerlite and EmailOctopus!). So I wouldn't through the towel just because there is competition, but rather look at the opportunity cost, do you really wanna spend time working on this?

What throws me is that they seem to think this would make their life much easier, and that there's no solution unless someone makes it... but there already is one. There are several. Specifically for their problem. Most of which seem to get the job done just fine. It'd be a big help to them, but they haven't even spent as much time as it took to describe to me what they want, looking for an existing solution. I'd bet they've never even asked anyone else in their line of work if they have a solution. Anyone who has, doesn't have the problem anymore. They don't need me to write an app, they need me to teach them how & when to effing google.

I'm aware of the ability to out-compete existing solutions on quality and UX and such, but most of the time when this happens, there aren't really any clear pain points in the existing solutions that I'm being told about, the person suggesting it is just totally oblivious to their existence, and they sure appear to do exactly the thing they need.

I do like the affiliate link suggestion from the other poster, haha.

Send them an affiliate link with "Remember that app you said I should build?"

This strongly correlates with the fact that older (40-50+) founders tend to have more successful startups. It might be because a) they intimately understand the problem that needs to be solved and b) they have the network to sell to others with the same problem.

c) overnight success stories take years to realize, d) it takes a long time to get all the failures out of the way

What I see as a problem from the business perspective is that devs are usually thrown into the surrounding of other tech folks and generally this particular tech bubble world we live in. And as someone smart said, for the man with the hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well in 99% of the cases where we split with my CTOs, in the end, wasn't because they were bad programmers, but because they were only keen to solve the issues that they perceived (DevOps, machine learning devops, cloud, encryption). That being said, there are a lot of amazing tech guys out there solving for completely non-tech related problems such as pigeon diapers but that's what it is in the end. It is the problem/solution paradigm, not whether you use rails, AI or blockchain to solve for it. Thats the hurdle I have seen in the past 10 years but maybe I was just unlucky.

It's not hard to think of the average user, though. Just imagine a version of yourself that doesn't enjoy learning technical minutiae to solve a problem.

I agree though it is hard for developers to find useful problems to solve. I too tend to get distracted from solving real-world problems when I find a technical problem that's interesting enough. There's a whole world of technical complexity which is easy to get lost in, and I start to care less about the real world problems that relate to it.

> The only thing they were good at was finding people with problems. It seems to me the only thing that matters.

It's certainly the bulk of the matter. Your average convenience store is nothing special, it's not a remarkable operation, it doesn't have geniuses running it, it has no overly interesting technology, it's not very innovative, it's not inventing the next great thing. It's doing nothing other than meeting a simple need - solving a problem - that its customers have, and frequently that's a boring, uninspiring business. There's definitely nothing wrong with that, the world functions because of tens of millions of uninspiring, boring businesses.

That is your average start-up, too. Tech founders - in my experience and observation - merely like to believe they're special and doing something exceptional versus the typical business. It's almost entirely a false sense of place in the universe, comically inflated ego (and it's why a show like Silicon Valley works so well).

That's my theory on why Theranos failed.

People talk about Silicon Valley like co-founders are using raw genius to solve impossible problems. But the reason untrained twenty year olds can run startups is the problems they're solving ultimately aren't that hard. Building a web application is something people in offices do every day.

Now, once those web applications start scaling up and your core product fundamentally works there are certainly hard problems to be solved, but at that point you can start hiring adults, PhDs and people with deep technical expertise.

Theranos got into such hot water because you can't just jazz-hands your way out of solving deep scientific problems, like you can cover up the fact that your web application barely works (but will totally work in three months).

I really appreciate this insight. It's comforting to be reminded that no one cares how something works as long as it works.

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