Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve?

I’m researching ideas for a new B2B product and want to understand real bottlenecks teams face.

What problems, inefficiencies, or recurring frustrations do you or your team deal with at work—where, if a solid solution existed, your company would actually pay for it?

Examples could include:

manual workflows

data or reporting pain points

communication gaps

compliance or documentation hassles

tools your team keeps hacking together internally

anything expensive, slow, or annoying

Would love to hear your role/industry (optional) and the specific problem you face.

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Neither my company nor any of the five companies I’ve worked for over the past ten years would ever trust any of their business to a one person SaaS shop we would throw some developers on it first.

Let me take that back. I was the developer lead for a company from 2016-2018 and we found this 2 person SaaS with a product that we needed. We were going to be 65% of his revenue if we signed the deal.

I spoke to my CTO and lawyers. We made the guy offer us a self hosted version and escrow his code with a third party that we would have the rights to depending on certain events.

> We made the guy offer us a self hosted version and escrow his code with a third party that we would have the rights to depending on certain events.

The guy agreed to this? Damn

There was a lot of legalese. But it boiled down to if he stopped working on it or got a hit by a bus.

Let me add on…we didn’t have exclusive rights to it nor could we redistribute the code or use it as the basis of an external product.

I am in a similar situation. It does not feel safe for big companies to rely on one man shows or small companies. Are there any ways for small companies to get out of this?

Ask some founders or do some research on how B2B companies got started. My n=1 experience working for a startup is that the founders were well connected and got one big contract from a health care system and expanded from there.

They also got investment from their customer and their customer opened doors.

I have been running a one-man sideline Saas for 18 years. I have found that most customers have no concept of what the company looks like behind a Saas product.

The only time I had the, "What happens if you get knocked down by a bus?" comment, was for a big bespoke contract, which I got.

I have never aimed to hoodwink anyone. I have just been surprised to learn in the average person's mind Saas = company of many people. One client of 10 years was shocked when I told him by email that I was in my 50s and a company of one.

I want a way of tracking all the major decisions leaders in the organization make. I’d then like those decisions scored over time, so we can discover who makes good decisions and who doesn’t.

The first decision they’ll make is not to buy a product that creates accountability for them while putting them under a microscope.

I work as a custodian lead and our custodial staff has long dreamed of an app called "Poopalert". What Poopalert does is use smartpipes (toilet drains equipped with smart device tech such as employee biomedical health monitoring) - so it uses smart pipes to see if there is an unflushed toilet. Then are staff will go flush and clean, so the next guy gets the proper clean experience, and we dock the phantom shitter a small premium for the service which goes to our bonus pool. Anyway, with the smartpipes we can also tell if an employee is unwell or a risk, basically assess their healthy status, and cull the herd so to speak by firing the bottom 10% least healthy workforce.

This will lead to an organization of obedient, respectful, team players, all of which are very healthy - and make our custodial duties - or doodies as it were - much easier!!

They track Covid outbreaks this way. Seems like a smart alert and invasion of privacy simultaneously.

The main problem most of my bosses at any level above me have had is that employees exist and add to opex.

If you can convert all continuing labor to 1 time spend on capital expenditures, then you’ll have a secure niche in the market

They generally seem to pay for enterprise level solutions AWS, GCP, Splunk, Slack, Databricks etc. and then anything else is teams doing integrations. The closest thing yo a startup they adopted was Cursor and even that was recent not as early adopter.

This sounds less like a product and more like a consulting business. There’s nothing wrong with that and consulting businesses sometimes are able to spin out products…consulting is also a possible way to generate revenue and build a team while developing a product. Good luck.

So the next logical question is what special skills or experience does he have that would make people hire him as a “consultant” instead of a run of the mill staff augmentation contractor?

yes but i am generally figuring out if something interests me and if i can work on it.

My advice, just start working on someqthing.

You can always abandon it if something better comes along.

yes doing that! thanks :)

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