5 ms·

Can anyone give a decent concrete real example of "extracting problem stories"? I see this line of thinking repeated a lot but haven't seen any realistic examp

by borplk 9y ago

Can anyone give a decent concrete real example of "extracting problem stories"? I see this line of thinking repeated a lot but haven't seen any realistic examples that could lead to a viable small businesses. There are obvious ones that you don't need anyone telling you nowadays. Like "I need a good customer support software.". You don't need someone telling you that to know that you can make customer support software and make money with it. It's an existing category with lots of money and competition in it. Chances are anything you want to make already fits inside an existing "category". In that case it's not that useful to know the problem exists. The hard part is competing with hundreds of existing companies that have multiple years of experience advantage over you. Or you may get specific individual complaints and requests. Either it's such a specific odd thing that the solution for it is going to be "use google docs, dropbox, Excel, etc...". Or it is "missing features" from other stuff like "Zendesk is ok but it doesn't do ...". I just don't quite see the "light bulb moment" of this "talk to people and hear their problems" narrative. Problems fit into broad categories like file sharing, website creation, collaboration, productivity tools, word processing, entertainment, and so on. Whatever you do is going to fall under a category/industry amongst a bunch of other companies. Then it's a matter of competition and incremental improvement and everything that comes with it. I can't imagine what sort of "surprising" problem description one might hear from people that could give you new substantial knowledge about something you didn't already know.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
For me, it's been "file sharing and productivity tools but inter-operate with these other products by exchanging data and also do single sign on for our domain so we don't have to remember another password". Others have been "we need this particular view of information with sorting/searching/etc, but involves a non-standard, weird API or requires straight SQL. Also add some buttons to send it to another service and automate other actions. Also make a mobile app for it". These basically amount to custom dashboards with specific modules for each service. For well-known solutions that have some way to let you run arbitrary code to do these extensions, your small business essentially works a consultant firm writing custom code. All of these boil down to a story of trying to save time/money while avoiding hiring full-time developers, and I've also heard some compliance requirements mainly in conflict-of-interest-disclosure solved by software as well (usually resulting in some document sent up the chain or to the legal dept).
bluetwo 9y ago
Problems are the opposite side of the coin from benefits. People often confuse benefits. They think they equate to features. A benefit is an increase of something good, or a reduction of something bad. A problem is the existence of not enough good or too much bad. i.e., if my problem is a damp basement, someone who treats damp basements offers a benefit that gets my attention
sumedh 9y ago
> Or it is "missing features" from other stuff like "Zendesk is ok but it doesn't do ...". The guy who started freshdesk said he read lot of comments on HN about how zendesk sucks so he started freshdesk to solve those problems.
- borplk 9y ago
  Sure but I don't see where the value of such feedback is. You can find lots of comments anywhere about how any one product sucks. Many of them will be 10+ year multi-million companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. It's not like that's going to empower you to compete with them. Or give you some advantage. Not to mention the difficulty of making something that is better (those "it sucks" comments will be written for your solution too).
  - sumedh 9y ago
    Looks like you are a glass half empty kind of guy. The value of such feedback is that it lets you know there is a problem where you can potentially offer a better solution. > Not to mention the difficulty of making something that is better Creating a brand new market in more difficult than providing a better solution for an established solution.
    - borplk 9y ago
      > The value of such feedback is that it lets you know there is a problem where you can potentially offer a better solution. I agree there are some cases when that may work but my point is that they are very very rare from what I can see. The vast majority of cases the complaint or problem statement is already crystal clear and well known such that finding it out doesn't give you any new information or anything of particular value because people always want a better version of what they have anyway. So you will always get "I want a better Photoshop" or "I want a better Dropbox" or "we like AWS but it doesn't have this feature" stuff. If the problem is in some very specific small niche that is unknown to most people it would be more useful. Like some obscure small non-tech-savvy niches that are stuck in the past decades and are so small that no big player bothers with them but perhaps you could make a good small business out of it if you know that they exist and what they are. For large established markets with well known famous multi-million and multi-billion players saying "$solution sucks" is as useful as saying that the sky is blue. If you want to get into the customer support desk software market you don't need a bunch of people telling you "Zendesk sucks" for you to know that there's room in that market. For a category that large there are tons of solutions and between them also tons of very happy and very unhappy people and everything in between. In the case of Freshdesk/Zendesk (and other similar categories of the same size and popularity) the barrier is overwhelmingly something other than simply knowing that the problem exists. Everybody knows almost every business needs customer support software. And whatever it is that they have, they always want it to better. If someone's capable of coming along and challenging something like Zendesk it's not like they need the "aha!" moment or encouragement of a bunch of people saying it sucks. I'm subscribed to a few sites that send "stated problems" daily/weekly and basically none of them are actionable. They read like something along the lines of, "We use Salesforce (or some other giant tool/company) ... it doesn't do this (or needs better UI/UX/API/Integration/etc) ... if there was something better we would consider paying up to $1000." I just find it difficult to imagine how someone goes from reading that to, "Aha! I got it. Now I'm going to go and make a better Salesforce."

by borplk 9y ago

FLUX-YOU 9y ago

For me, it's been "file sharing and productivity tools but inter-operate with these other products by exchanging data and also do single sign on for our domain so we don't have to remember another password". Others have been "we need this particular view of information with sorting/searching/etc, but involves a non-standard, weird API or requires straight SQL. Also add some buttons to send it to another service and automate other actions. Also make a mobile app for it". These basically amount to custom dashboards with specific modules for each service. For well-known solutions that have some way to let you run arbitrary code to do these extensions, your small business essentially works a consultant firm writing custom code. All of these boil down to a story of trying to save time/money while avoiding hiring full-time developers, and I've also heard some compliance requirements mainly in conflict-of-interest-disclosure solved by software as well (usually resulting in some document sent up the chain or to the legal dept).

bluetwo 9y ago

Problems are the opposite side of the coin from benefits. People often confuse benefits. They think they equate to features. A benefit is an increase of something good, or a reduction of something bad. A problem is the existence of not enough good or too much bad. i.e., if my problem is a damp basement, someone who treats damp basements offers a benefit that gets my attention

sumedh 9y ago

> Or it is "missing features" from other stuff like "Zendesk is ok but it doesn't do ...". The guy who started freshdesk said he read lot of comments on HN about how zendesk sucks so he started freshdesk to solve those problems.

borplk 9y ago
Sure but I don't see where the value of such feedback is. You can find lots of comments anywhere about how any one product sucks. Many of them will be 10+ year multi-million companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. It's not like that's going to empower you to compete with them. Or give you some advantage. Not to mention the difficulty of making something that is better (those "it sucks" comments will be written for your solution too).
- sumedh 9y ago
  Looks like you are a glass half empty kind of guy. The value of such feedback is that it lets you know there is a problem where you can potentially offer a better solution. > Not to mention the difficulty of making something that is better Creating a brand new market in more difficult than providing a better solution for an established solution.
  - borplk 9y ago
    > The value of such feedback is that it lets you know there is a problem where you can potentially offer a better solution. I agree there are some cases when that may work but my point is that they are very very rare from what I can see. The vast majority of cases the complaint or problem statement is already crystal clear and well known such that finding it out doesn't give you any new information or anything of particular value because people always want a better version of what they have anyway. So you will always get "I want a better Photoshop" or "I want a better Dropbox" or "we like AWS but it doesn't have this feature" stuff. If the problem is in some very specific small niche that is unknown to most people it would be more useful. Like some obscure small non-tech-savvy niches that are stuck in the past decades and are so small that no big player bothers with them but perhaps you could make a good small business out of it if you know that they exist and what they are. For large established markets with well known famous multi-million and multi-billion players saying "$solution sucks" is as useful as saying that the sky is blue. If you want to get into the customer support desk software market you don't need a bunch of people telling you "Zendesk sucks" for you to know that there's room in that market. For a category that large there are tons of solutions and between them also tons of very happy and very unhappy people and everything in between. In the case of Freshdesk/Zendesk (and other similar categories of the same size and popularity) the barrier is overwhelmingly something other than simply knowing that the problem exists. Everybody knows almost every business needs customer support software. And whatever it is that they have, they always want it to better. If someone's capable of coming along and challenging something like Zendesk it's not like they need the "aha!" moment or encouragement of a bunch of people saying it sucks. I'm subscribed to a few sites that send "stated problems" daily/weekly and basically none of them are actionable. They read like something along the lines of, "We use Salesforce (or some other giant tool/company) ... it doesn't do this (or needs better UI/UX/API/Integration/etc) ... if there was something better we would consider paying up to $1000." I just find it difficult to imagine how someone goes from reading that to, "Aha! I got it. Now I'm going to go and make a better Salesforce."