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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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