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One of the points the author makes is that you should track the problems you have, and the ones that reoccur will be good signals to solve them. Does anyone el

One of the points the author makes is that you should track the problems you have, and the ones that reoccur will be good signals to solve them. Does anyone else feel pretty content with what they have? Because this strategy I think Paul Graham has talked about in one of his essays for ideas. And to be honest, I do genuinely feel like I don't have much if anything to complain about, and so I can't really think of startup ideas. To the point where I'm just consulting at the moment because I can't think of any startup idea to work on. I mean I have ideas of problems I want to solve - but they've all been met by massive resistance because they're huge problems. Like for instance one idea I had was I hate making food, but I don't want to eat out all of the time. Can you crowdsource cooking from your neighbors? So I tried building that platform. I instantly discovered there were huge safety regulations about cooking, and that really baking (or anything that isn't extremely perishable) is the only thing you can pretty much do out of your home and not get slapped by the state for violating health codes. So I'm just sort of defeated...the only problems I want to tackle just seem massive and I can't seem to find the divide-and-conquer algorithm to help the world in a smaller (but still meaningful) way.

baxtr 9y ago
I agree with your observation. It is difficult to find problems worth solving. I thought and read about this a lot. And I think solving problems is just one way, one flavor of deciding which thing to build. I’d say this is the Silicon Valley school of thought, very much influenced by VCs. There is a another way, which I have picked up from Seth Godin: Tell the right story. People don’t always know why they buy things. Why do I need a smart watch? Why do I need fancy shoes? They don’t solve a real problem. But, they make me feel good. Because I can tell a story to myself. A think this blend of deciding what to do is more art than rational, that’s what it’s maybe not that popular. But if you start to look around, you will notice the story of stuff people buy.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
  a.k.a the Apple school of thought.
ajdlinux 9y ago
Yep, you're definitely not alone here. I also find that sometimes I can think of problems that aren't really a single problem but a whole category of problems, and I have no idea which particular piece I'd like to break off, or any idea for a solution.
- sdoering 9y ago
  Exactly. Because breaking the law really shows your integrity. Especially regarding food intake, where one un-hygienic perdon could endanger the lives of many. Personally I like the idea of regulation to ensure a minimum level of quality and security. Look at the aviation industry. Just as an example. What do you think makes flying one of the safest methods of travel? It is easy to dismiss regulations as hindering. But be prepared to have the consequences dealt with.
  - chrisshroba 9y ago
    Hey, I think you meant to respond to tropshop, not ajdlinux :)
tropshop 9y ago
Did the massive regulation on the taxi industry stop Uber? If you build something people find genuinely useful, you will become a force that causes the market to adapt. Regulation follows innovation.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I'm founding Uber for Biotech. No biosafety regulation is going to stop us from CRISPRing our way into better future! Seriously though, I get that archaic rules need to be fought in order to be changed. But there are proper ways to do that, and Uber did it in about the most antisocial way possible aside from murdering people. Please, don't be like Uber. Innovations need a stable society to flourish.
  - mft_ 9y ago
    Eh. No defence of the way Kalanick or some of his minions acted in certain situations, but... Uber was entering an incredibly difficult space, given the power and entrenchment of the existing taxi business/lobby, and the generally anti-innovation and protectionist approach of many local politicians. Without their 'hustle' and willingness to take steps which were risky, relatively antisocial, and often illegal (e.g. entering cities illegally first and asking for permission later, organising pretty challenging pressure campaigns against local politicians, authorities, etc.) they'd not have made it past a year, let alone revolutionised an industry. Their downfall was applying the same risk and hustle mentality indiscriminately, including within their own company.
    - enraged_camel 9y ago
      >>Without their 'hustle' and willingness to take steps which were risky, relatively antisocial, and often illegal (e.g. entering cities illegally first and asking for permission later, organising pretty challenging pressure campaigns against local politicians, authorities, etc.) they'd not have made it past a year, let alone revolutionised an industry. Are you kidding? If SpaceX was able to break ULA’s monopoly on launching god damn rockets to space and do it in a way that doesn’t break laws and regulations, Uber certainly could have done the same in the taxi industry.
ryandrake 9y ago
Here’s some more trouble with that: if startups only solve problems that scratch a personal itch, we end up with 20 chat apps, 10 food delivery services, 5 bicycle rentals, Uber for maids, mobile dog shampoo services, basically startups that solve problems for 20-something urban tech workers. As others mentioned, better to find other people totally not like you and figure out what problems they have to solve. They may be boring problems too, but maybe you’ll stumble onto a totally unaddressed niche.
- newman8r 9y ago
  That's also one of the advantages of traveling, exploring, stepping outside your comfort zone, etc. New experiences can open you up to completely new ideas.
snitko 9y ago
This only applies to US and a bunch of other countries that would bother to enforce the law regarding cooking regulation. Most countries wouldn't really care as they have more important issues to solve than clamp down on innocent people making informed choices about their lives. So the idea isn't really bad.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > Most countries wouldn't really care as they have more important issues to solve than clamp down on innocent people making informed choices about their lives. So the idea isn't really bad. Yup. More important issues like no rule of law, no sanitation, low literacy rates, mob rule, etc. "Clamping down on innocent people making informed choices about their lives" is what you get to once you stabilize a society and solve its most urgent, life-threatening problems. It's what you get to once people are living in relative health and safety, and then you discover that "informed choices" aren't really that informed, because they're made in the environment full of scammers and people who can't give two fucks about other human beings, if it means few dollars more. And once you get to that, you can live in a world where food poisoning in a restaurant is national news.
  - ObeyTheGuts 9y ago
    food? in usa? where?
  - vinceguidry 9y ago
    > Yup. More important issues like no rule of law, no sanitation, low literacy rates, mob rule, etc. That's just silly. There are plenty of countries out there with friendlier business climates that aren't still in the bush league. Most South American countries and Eastern Europe and many Asian countries should be on your list if you're considering moving abroad to start a business. Personally my pick is Colombia.
  - crucialfelix 9y ago
    Supper clubs are quite popular here in Europe. We have excellent sanitation and literacy, thank you. https://theculturetrip.com/europe/germany/articles/discover-the-underground-supper-clubs-of-berlin/ https://theculturetrip.com/europe/germany/articles/discover-... In addition to the fancy ones in the articles there are a lot that are cheap and emphasize dining together with strangers. I went to a Syrian refugee dinner in a cafe/film theater. The Syrians were all smart college grads with interesting stories. There used to be a lot of squats in Berlin that were given legal status as long as they did a community dinner once a week. Punk bars and cafes would serve vegan chow for €2. It wasn't like a restaurant at all, more like visiting friends. Probably this still happens but I haven't gone in a long time.
pryelluw 9y ago
I don't normally talk about this, but here is what you are missing: Businesses that make (real) money revolve around one of two ideas: - They sell shovels - They are middlemen (middlepeople?) They sell shovels. This is stolen from the old saying that during the American gold rush the people who made the money were the ones selling shovels. Or facilitating others to go and do what they wanted (in this case, chase a wild dream). Uber, the example you used, sells shovels. It lets people make money from their car. Real money. Not peanuts. Your idea to sell food to neighbors didn't have the potential to make much money. You weren't selling shovels, you were selling work (cooking is hard work). Now, let's take your current business (which you list in your profile). You sell shovels because you help companies get what they what in terms of engineering management (lots of money to be made there). Better engineering processes usually trickles down into the finances. In a way, you are selling money. They are middlemen. A middleman is someone who simply takes a cut for facilitating something. They import beer from somewhere else and by doing that they jack up the price a little bit and resell it to you. This is a very straightforward mechanic. Amazon is one of the best middlemen out there right now. It even changed the game by reducing the friction in selling online. Their whole "fulfilled by Amazon" approach is a classic middlemen tactic. Middlemen sell the idea that they make getting what you want easier. How to apply this to software Selling shovels: Build a product that makes people money. Ecommerce is still growing. Do something there. Be a middleman: Find something to facilitate. Look for inefficiencies. How? Listen to complaints. People love to complain to someone who listens. Make some contacts on social media and listen to people. They will show you the way. One last thing: don't be stupid. Big ideas are tied to a big ego. You are not Musk, Jobs, or Gates. Who cares?! Look for small ideas that you can execute well. And then execute, not for passion or ego, but as a grind. Like a regular job. Because that's what it is. Good luck.
- acconrad 9y ago
  Thank you for this thorough and thoughtful response! Lots to soak in here. I agree, I am certainly not Elon Musk, there is no ego here. I'm just saying that the problem spaces I want to help with (environment, health/fitness/healthcare) don't seem like the problems I can effectively tackle because, as I mentioned before, I can't seem to find a way to divide-and-conquer into a smaller idea I can execute on. Do you have any thoughts behind that? I guess maybe talk with people in those spaces and see what problems they are having that could benefit from some tiny innovation?
newman8r 9y ago
I can relate to your sentiment of being content with what you have. I gave up my smartphone, I canceled all paid subscription services, I use linux and open source software for everything. Basically, it's difficult for me to imagine personally paying for any type of SAAS offering, so when I'm working on a project with a paid model, sometimes I have to employ a 'suspension of disbelief' because I'm working on something that I know I probably wouldn't be willing to pay for (not because it sucks, just because I'm hesitant to pay for any software or online service).
- qw 9y ago
  For a business, everything has a cost. Let's say you need to a payment solution. Most will use something like Stripe instead of hiring new teams of developers to implement from scratch. The same can be said about smaller services too. Something that sounds simple, like sending emails is actually very time consuming due to spam-filters etc. First you have the initial work, and then you have all the follow up during the lifetime of your business. This includes not only the cost of running servers and patching software, but also all the bugs. Every time a customer does not get a mail, you will have to dig into the system to find out why. Hopefully the dev who implemented it still works there, or you would need time for the new person to ramp up. The alternative is to pay a small amount for a 3rd party mail service.
  - newman8r 9y ago
    That's a good point, I like the idea of identifying solutions using a cost-benefit approach.
- rorykoehler 9y ago
  That just tells me you value money more than your time. Most people have this the other way around. You can always make more money but you can't make more time.
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    Not necessaarily, I have a similar mindset to the parent poster and for me it's largely about keeping the business simple and manageable. To give an example I sell my software through Avangate, this results in a single invoice and payment each month. I know if I switched to Stripe it would save my a couple of percentage points on each sale but then I'd need to maintain systems that handled EU VAT laws, issue license codes and import a lot of data into my accounting system, in fact I'd need to upgrade my accounting system which is fine with a few transactions each month but would be stretched at fifty or more. This has been my experience with most of these services, great if you want to grow a large business because you are effectively outsourcing some of your work but it does tend to complicate things. Personally I like my work to be small and simple.
mikekchar 9y ago
Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is what wins (or sometimes you just get lucky). Your cooking annoyance is a good place to do thought experiments. I don't always want to cook, but in cases where I don't want to cook I don't always want to go out. Proposed solution: Get my neighbours to cook for me. It's a good idea, but after you investigated, it was infeasible. There are two ways you can go with this. First, you now have a new annoyance: normal people can't sell their own food creations without poisoning people (or, alternatively, the government discourages people poisoning each other :-) ). Nothing is saying that you have to stay with your original annoyance. You can move. And since this is a thought experiment, maybe you might come up with another idea and investigate that. If it doesn't pan out, then you will get new annoyances. This technique is pretty similar to Toyota's "5 whys". Before they decide on how to fix a problem they first ask why the problem exists. When they answer that question, they ask why that situation exists. They go down 5 times (I don't think that number is actually carved out in stone, but you get the idea). At that point they have a much better idea of the situation and can choose the most effective place to solve their problem. But you may come to a realisation that "getting my neighbours to cook for me" is not going to be feasible -- and that nothing down that chain is going to work out. That's not a problem, because it's not the only solution to the problem. For example (and feel free to steal this idea) I live in Japan and my wife was ill the other day. Normally she makes me a packed lunch. I was too busy with work to return the favour, so instead I went to the convenience store and bought some instant ramen. You may have eaten instant ramen before. When I lived in Canada, I learned how horrible it is. But in Japan, if you spend $2 instead of $1 the instant ramen is pretty freaking good. If you spend $3 instead of $2, it's almost as good as I can make myself (the only real downside is that the toppings are not really numerous enough). I thought to myself, "I wonder if I could export these amazing ramen soups to the US. I'm sure you can get them in specialty stores, but this is absolutely ripe for exploitation on the web. These things weigh nothing and they will ship perfectly. And they don't rot in any reasonable time frame. Why the heck is there not anything like this?" So I did my 5 why's and realised that if you want to do it, you have to be in the US (or wherever you want to sell) because you need to order container sized amounts to make the overseas shipping reasonable. This means you need a distribution centre at the destination. But I absolutely guarantee that Nissin (or whoever you want to talk to) would be thrilled to sell you a container of ramen, with which you can do a "Ramen of the week club" on the internet (surely this already exists... surely... I haven't actually checked). Anyway, that's an example. Don't give up is the answer. One idea is nothing. Let it go. Use it to inform your next move. Keep going and never stop. Edit: I just had a quick look. There are internet ramen clubs, but their ramen is all crap. Ripe for disruption -- look for ramen in a bowl shaped container. Edit Edit: Darn: https://japanramenbox.com https://japanramenbox.com This is exactly what I was thinking. Hope they do well (though you might be able to undercut them ;-) ).
jen729w 9y ago
I feel like people - us, here, on this forum - sometimes think too big. Like, we have to invent the new Facebook or it’s not worth it. I think that can cripple our thinking. (Obviously I’m massively generalising. I’m not having a dig at anyone here.) I’ve realised recently that there’s good money to be made solving little problems. Not Zuckerberg money, but who wants that lifestyle. Ramen money. Example: my partner is a medical copywriter. Some jobs, she spends hours reformatting journal citations. All she’s doing is making part of it italic, making sure the dashes are all en-dashes, whatever. How many medical copywriters are there? How many people have this problem? Now, it’s not a life-changing thing, but it’s what computers are for! So we’re building a little tool that will make this easier for us. What’s our goal? I don’t know. To make enough to pay our rent? That’d be lovely for starters and what is that, a thousand people giving us $5/month each? That’s nothing. It also helps, of course, that she’s in this industry. She knows where to go to find other people with the same problem. Solve something in your domain, and everything’s going to be easier. (It’s also why I’m not afraid of telling everyone here what the idea is. Chances of someone else being passionate and knowledgeable about this, enough to steal the idea, are near nil.) That’s where my head’s at, and it makes thinking about this stuff much easier for me, at least.
- pryelluw 9y ago
  Yes, that is a good approach. Remember that making money is about buying your freedom to survive. You can do so without being a millionaire.
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
  This sort of problem is everywhere. I can recall back in the old Business of Software forum on joelonsoftware when I pointed out that I was digging in my garden and came across a grub. Since I was thinking about the people who said they could never "think of business ideas" I wondered if there was software that had something to do with grubs and bugs. Less than a minute on google and I had pages of Pest Management Software. The moral of the story was that if I could come up with software business ideas while digging in the dirt, it shouldn't be that hard to see opportunities all around.
murukesh_s 9y ago
Having a pain point and validating it with a set of other users is a good vector for success. While that is true I have seen/heard/read many ideas that are brainstormed in a room and selected at random becoming widely successful. Anyway, regarding food you could have thought about a machine/robot based solution, at least to begin with :)
- mft_ 9y ago
  I disagree. Many people lack the vision, or sometimes the same negative experience to understand that something needs changing, of people with the original idea. And people often default to the negative, in my experience. Brainstorm Uber with a group of people and you'd get challenges that taxis already exist and are fine, that laws stand in your way, and that people wouldn't want to get in a stranger's car. Or to misquote (I think?) Steve Jobs, if Henry Ford had asked his users what they'd wanted before building the Model T, they'd have asked for a faster horse.
tathougies 9y ago
I mean... you may not be able to distribute food, but as far as I know, it's certainly not illegal to create a social networking app where someone can say "I'm interested in a sandwich" and another person says "I'll make you a sandwich for $5". If Tinder is legal, I don't see how that could not be.
- goatherders 9y ago
  Because Tinder isnt bound by the FDA or any commercial food distribution regulations. Try again.
  - tathougies 9y ago
    Neither is connecting people to cook food for each other. If your tinder date cooks you breakfast, has anyone run afoul of food safety laws? You can't be a food distributor if you're not distributing food. I've gone to our local small business seminars for food service, and I've been told that as long as you're not handling food at any point, you can't be held responsible.
- ShannonAlther 9y ago
  I'm also in the "everything is kind of okay in my workflow" boat. One of the major problems I hear about and encounter frequently is that biotech is a painful industry. Creating and selling new drugs takes decades and costs millions of dollars. This isn't some immutable law of pharmacology, it's because drugs have to be approved by regulatory agencies like the FDA, and no amount of clever engineering is going to make clinical trials less onerous. I think just about every industry that seems, from the outside, to have exploitable conditions like this has hidden barriers. The taxi industry looked exploitable, but in fact was tightly regulated. Uber has managed to capture some of the market by pretending to not be a taxi company, and wound up in a plethora of legal battles for their trouble. I propose that how obvious or necessary a business idea appears at first glance is directly proportional to how difficult it would be to implement.
shubhamjain 9y ago
I would suggest trying to think about what task your team has to do often that is better done by a software--a minor but recurring annoyance. Like, in my case, - Backend and Frontend development are never in sync, so we have to resort to mocking the API by using dummy code. There are API mocking services, but I would prefer something that mocks locally. Charles Proxy is great for this but it can be limiting and isn't very intuitive. - Every time our customers face an obscure issue with the product, there's plenty of to and fro to understand the root cause of the issue. If there was a product that could tell us the trail of actions that the customers followed, it'll make debugging vastly easier. Of course, there's a world of difference in recognizing the problem and creating a sustainable product. But, every organization is inefficient in some sort of way. It's just a matter of observing carefully.
- enz 9y ago
  > If there was a product that could tell us the trail of actions that the customers followed, it'll make debugging vastly easier. Sentry.io may be a good start, perhaps?
ed 9y ago
Find something new-ish (e.g. AI, cryptocurrencies), and learn as much as possible about that thing (like, build a toy version of it, get an intuitive understanding of its parts). Product ideas and applications will jump out at you. The kind of ideas you get when you're deliberately trying to come up with ideas, are always obvious and often startup cliches (like food delivery).
- adwn 9y ago
  > AI, cryptocurrencies [...] The kind of ideas you get when you're deliberately trying to come up with ideas, are always obvious and often startup cliches (like food delivery). I would say that AI and cryptocurrencies are the startup clichés of today. Don't start with a solution in search of a problem. Instead, start with a problem, and see if you can find a solution. When comparing problem-solution pairs, discount those that involve trendy, hyped technologies, to account for mental bias.
  - ed 9y ago
    > I would say that AI and cryptocurrencies are the startup clichés of today. To say they're cliche suggests we've exhausted all ideas in the space which we definitely have not.
rorykoehler 9y ago
>Can you crowdsource cooking from your neighbors? They have what is essentially this service in Singapore. Professional kitchens that make home cooked meals. Very popular.
- meheleventyone 9y ago
  Professional kitchens doing home delivery isn’t a new concept though. The OP wanted to scale it in the mode of AirBnB or Uber where margins are reduced by replacing professional staff and rented locations with itinerant labour providing their own setup and shouldering much of the risk.
  - rorykoehler 9y ago
    Not at all but they have been enabled by Internet technologies and the cultural change brought about by Internet technologies.
chrischen 9y ago
I built Instapainting.com to serve customers and have not personally had a reason to use the service myself. Essentially I have to do more guesswork and testing, but it can be done. Not all services have to be built to satisfy your own needs, and arguably at some point all services must grow to beyond one’s own needs. So it’s a necessary skill to develop and required at some point to grow and serve new niches or new use cases or markets.
- Kagerjay 9y ago
  I read through your indiehackers post and it was very interesting to see your approach on SEO, e.g. viral marketing with interesting side projects
kiksy 9y ago
From your example you came across a nested problem with the safety regulations. What about building something trying to ease the pain and streamline getting the required permits to cook domestically?
cornholio 9y ago
I'm exceptionally lazy and always feel the need more machines. I need a machine that washes and flosses my teeth fast and thoroughly, I waste 15-20 minutes each day doing that. I need a robotic dishwasher/cupboard cabinet that I simply open the lid, trow the dirty plates then simply pick them up clean from the adjacent cupboard. Ditto for dry, ironed laundry. I need a food printer with attached smart refrigerator that I can download my favorite recipes into and will order the necessary ingredients and automatically cook the meal at the programmed time. A flying machine, oh man, how much I need a flying machine. Ok, maybe those are grand ideas that need billions of dollars of research, but any one of those involves a myriad of smaller improvements that can turn into startup products. The potential for improving our lives is so vast I cannot imagine how could anyone say "I have everything I need".
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  Between a WaterPik flosser and a Sonicare electric toothbrush, I've knocked my daily dental hygiene time down to like 4 minutes. It would be really hard to improve on that combo.
  - animal531 9y ago
    What about something you just bite onto (a bit like a boxer's mouthguard) that cleans your teeth while you're doing something else? Then it's down to effectively 15 seconds.
    - vinceguidry 9y ago
      I didn't say it was impossible.
    - bronco21016 9y ago
      Apparently 3 seconds. [1] [1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/unico-smartbrush--3#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/unico-smartbrush--3#/
- animal531 9y ago
  Also fun idea, why should you have a cupboard to store your china and silverware etc in? Why not just have the washer also be the storage, then you just walk up to it and select e.g. plate + fork on the frontend and it spits out a clean pair for you. When you're done you place them back in and they're washed and stored for later use. Same for the clothing, although in that case one might argue that a lady might enjoy the display of the product and wants to physically see them. Ideally in the (small) house of the future the tighter packing allowed by the machine might be a great advantage.
vinceguidry 9y ago
You're not thinking about problems hard enough. Instead just giving up when something sounds vaguely hard. Get rid of the vagueness, figure out exactly how hard it is. As per your example, have you done the research concerning health codes and what sorts of operations violate them and which don't? I'm pretty sure off the top of my head that if you're not actually selling food, as in taking in payments and delivering food, you're not on the hook for what other people are doing in their homes. So I can envision a service facilitating neighborhood meal swaps. The state might not exactly like it, but it won't have anyone to go after for health code violations. This is pretty much exactly what Uber did, they kept toeing ever closer to the line of the actually illegal until they had both the legal budget and a public mandate to fight City Hall.
Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
Regarding your specific problem, maybe it's not as grim as you see, you just have to think bigger and farther ahead: I am talking of course about Robot Kitchens. After automated driving this will probably be the next big frontier. This seems to be the state of the art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNcPVvIs_tk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNcPVvIs_tk http://www.moley.com/about-us/ http://www.moley.com/about-us/ They state that the consumer version is set to launch in 2018. It will probably take several more years to work out all the kinks. But this is likely the actual future of cooking, not the local outsourcing.
Cactus2018 9y ago
Crowdsource cooking from neighbors startup 'Josephine' recently shutdown https://medium.com/the-dish/continuing-the-home-cooking-movement-8d28bb1cd496 https://medium.com/the-dish/continuing-the-home-cooking-move...
bluedino 9y ago
In case you haven’t noticed, Uber, AirBnB don’t care about regulations
thisisit 9y ago
I came around to this couple of days late, so I don't know if it's worth it but here's my take on it. Your identified problem was - Don't like cooking and don't want to eat outside. The solution you had was - crowdsource cooking. But how about looking it in another way? What do you disliked more - cooking or unhealthy outside food? I dislike cooking. One of the issues with cooking is that prep, measurement and deciding menu takes time. Lot of times I am stuck with - what to cook today? So, how do we solve this problem? Meal Kits. I know they still don't take away from the fact that you need to cook. But it is similar to getting food from outside, even if they are your neighbor. So, it is not only the problem but solution that matters as well.

baxtr 9y ago

I agree with your observation. It is difficult to find problems worth solving. I thought and read about this a lot. And I think solving problems is just one way, one flavor of deciding which thing to build. I’d say this is the Silicon Valley school of thought, very much influenced by VCs. There is a another way, which I have picked up from Seth Godin: Tell the right story. People don’t always know why they buy things. Why do I need a smart watch? Why do I need fancy shoes? They don’t solve a real problem. But, they make me feel good. Because I can tell a story to myself. A think this blend of deciding what to do is more art than rational, that’s what it’s maybe not that popular. But if you start to look around, you will notice the story of stuff people buy.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
a.k.a the Apple school of thought.

ajdlinux 9y ago

Yep, you're definitely not alone here. I also find that sometimes I can think of problems that aren't really a single problem but a whole category of problems, and I have no idea which particular piece I'd like to break off, or any idea for a solution.

sdoering 9y ago
Exactly. Because breaking the law really shows your integrity. Especially regarding food intake, where one un-hygienic perdon could endanger the lives of many. Personally I like the idea of regulation to ensure a minimum level of quality and security. Look at the aviation industry. Just as an example. What do you think makes flying one of the safest methods of travel? It is easy to dismiss regulations as hindering. But be prepared to have the consequences dealt with.
- chrisshroba 9y ago
  Hey, I think you meant to respond to tropshop, not ajdlinux :)

tropshop 9y ago

Did the massive regulation on the taxi industry stop Uber? If you build something people find genuinely useful, you will become a force that causes the market to adapt. Regulation follows innovation.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
I'm founding Uber for Biotech. No biosafety regulation is going to stop us from CRISPRing our way into better future! Seriously though, I get that archaic rules need to be fought in order to be changed. But there are proper ways to do that, and Uber did it in about the most antisocial way possible aside from murdering people. Please, don't be like Uber. Innovations need a stable society to flourish.
- mft_ 9y ago
  Eh. No defence of the way Kalanick or some of his minions acted in certain situations, but... Uber was entering an incredibly difficult space, given the power and entrenchment of the existing taxi business/lobby, and the generally anti-innovation and protectionist approach of many local politicians. Without their 'hustle' and willingness to take steps which were risky, relatively antisocial, and often illegal (e.g. entering cities illegally first and asking for permission later, organising pretty challenging pressure campaigns against local politicians, authorities, etc.) they'd not have made it past a year, let alone revolutionised an industry. Their downfall was applying the same risk and hustle mentality indiscriminately, including within their own company.
  - enraged_camel 9y ago
    >>Without their 'hustle' and willingness to take steps which were risky, relatively antisocial, and often illegal (e.g. entering cities illegally first and asking for permission later, organising pretty challenging pressure campaigns against local politicians, authorities, etc.) they'd not have made it past a year, let alone revolutionised an industry. Are you kidding? If SpaceX was able to break ULA’s monopoly on launching god damn rockets to space and do it in a way that doesn’t break laws and regulations, Uber certainly could have done the same in the taxi industry.

ryandrake 9y ago

Here’s some more trouble with that: if startups only solve problems that scratch a personal itch, we end up with 20 chat apps, 10 food delivery services, 5 bicycle rentals, Uber for maids, mobile dog shampoo services, basically startups that solve problems for 20-something urban tech workers. As others mentioned, better to find other people totally not like you and figure out what problems they have to solve. They may be boring problems too, but maybe you’ll stumble onto a totally unaddressed niche.

newman8r 9y ago
That's also one of the advantages of traveling, exploring, stepping outside your comfort zone, etc. New experiences can open you up to completely new ideas.

snitko 9y ago

This only applies to US and a bunch of other countries that would bother to enforce the law regarding cooking regulation. Most countries wouldn't really care as they have more important issues to solve than clamp down on innocent people making informed choices about their lives. So the idea isn't really bad.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
> Most countries wouldn't really care as they have more important issues to solve than clamp down on innocent people making informed choices about their lives. So the idea isn't really bad. Yup. More important issues like no rule of law, no sanitation, low literacy rates, mob rule, etc. "Clamping down on innocent people making informed choices about their lives" is what you get to once you stabilize a society and solve its most urgent, life-threatening problems. It's what you get to once people are living in relative health and safety, and then you discover that "informed choices" aren't really that informed, because they're made in the environment full of scammers and people who can't give two fucks about other human beings, if it means few dollars more. And once you get to that, you can live in a world where food poisoning in a restaurant is national news.
- ObeyTheGuts 9y ago
  food? in usa? where?
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  > Yup. More important issues like no rule of law, no sanitation, low literacy rates, mob rule, etc. That's just silly. There are plenty of countries out there with friendlier business climates that aren't still in the bush league. Most South American countries and Eastern Europe and many Asian countries should be on your list if you're considering moving abroad to start a business. Personally my pick is Colombia.
- crucialfelix 9y ago
  Supper clubs are quite popular here in Europe. We have excellent sanitation and literacy, thank you. https://theculturetrip.com/europe/germany/articles/discover-the-underground-supper-clubs-of-berlin/ https://theculturetrip.com/europe/germany/articles/discover-... In addition to the fancy ones in the articles there are a lot that are cheap and emphasize dining together with strangers. I went to a Syrian refugee dinner in a cafe/film theater. The Syrians were all smart college grads with interesting stories. There used to be a lot of squats in Berlin that were given legal status as long as they did a community dinner once a week. Punk bars and cafes would serve vegan chow for €2. It wasn't like a restaurant at all, more like visiting friends. Probably this still happens but I haven't gone in a long time.

pryelluw 9y ago

I don't normally talk about this, but here is what you are missing: Businesses that make (real) money revolve around one of two ideas: - They sell shovels - They are middlemen (middlepeople?) They sell shovels. This is stolen from the old saying that during the American gold rush the people who made the money were the ones selling shovels. Or facilitating others to go and do what they wanted (in this case, chase a wild dream). Uber, the example you used, sells shovels. It lets people make money from their car. Real money. Not peanuts. Your idea to sell food to neighbors didn't have the potential to make much money. You weren't selling shovels, you were selling work (cooking is hard work). Now, let's take your current business (which you list in your profile). You sell shovels because you help companies get what they what in terms of engineering management (lots of money to be made there). Better engineering processes usually trickles down into the finances. In a way, you are selling money. They are middlemen. A middleman is someone who simply takes a cut for facilitating something. They import beer from somewhere else and by doing that they jack up the price a little bit and resell it to you. This is a very straightforward mechanic. Amazon is one of the best middlemen out there right now. It even changed the game by reducing the friction in selling online. Their whole "fulfilled by Amazon" approach is a classic middlemen tactic. Middlemen sell the idea that they make getting what you want easier. How to apply this to software Selling shovels: Build a product that makes people money. Ecommerce is still growing. Do something there. Be a middleman: Find something to facilitate. Look for inefficiencies. How? Listen to complaints. People love to complain to someone who listens. Make some contacts on social media and listen to people. They will show you the way. One last thing: don't be stupid. Big ideas are tied to a big ego. You are not Musk, Jobs, or Gates. Who cares?! Look for small ideas that you can execute well. And then execute, not for passion or ego, but as a grind. Like a regular job. Because that's what it is. Good luck.

acconrad 9y ago
Thank you for this thorough and thoughtful response! Lots to soak in here. I agree, I am certainly not Elon Musk, there is no ego here. I'm just saying that the problem spaces I want to help with (environment, health/fitness/healthcare) don't seem like the problems I can effectively tackle because, as I mentioned before, I can't seem to find a way to divide-and-conquer into a smaller idea I can execute on. Do you have any thoughts behind that? I guess maybe talk with people in those spaces and see what problems they are having that could benefit from some tiny innovation?

newman8r 9y ago

I can relate to your sentiment of being content with what you have. I gave up my smartphone, I canceled all paid subscription services, I use linux and open source software for everything. Basically, it's difficult for me to imagine personally paying for any type of SAAS offering, so when I'm working on a project with a paid model, sometimes I have to employ a 'suspension of disbelief' because I'm working on something that I know I probably wouldn't be willing to pay for (not because it sucks, just because I'm hesitant to pay for any software or online service).

qw 9y ago
For a business, everything has a cost. Let's say you need to a payment solution. Most will use something like Stripe instead of hiring new teams of developers to implement from scratch. The same can be said about smaller services too. Something that sounds simple, like sending emails is actually very time consuming due to spam-filters etc. First you have the initial work, and then you have all the follow up during the lifetime of your business. This includes not only the cost of running servers and patching software, but also all the bugs. Every time a customer does not get a mail, you will have to dig into the system to find out why. Hopefully the dev who implemented it still works there, or you would need time for the new person to ramp up. The alternative is to pay a small amount for a 3rd party mail service.
- newman8r 9y ago
  That's a good point, I like the idea of identifying solutions using a cost-benefit approach.
rorykoehler 9y ago
That just tells me you value money more than your time. Most people have this the other way around. You can always make more money but you can't make more time.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  Not necessaarily, I have a similar mindset to the parent poster and for me it's largely about keeping the business simple and manageable. To give an example I sell my software through Avangate, this results in a single invoice and payment each month. I know if I switched to Stripe it would save my a couple of percentage points on each sale but then I'd need to maintain systems that handled EU VAT laws, issue license codes and import a lot of data into my accounting system, in fact I'd need to upgrade my accounting system which is fine with a few transactions each month but would be stretched at fifty or more. This has been my experience with most of these services, great if you want to grow a large business because you are effectively outsourcing some of your work but it does tend to complicate things. Personally I like my work to be small and simple.

mikekchar 9y ago

Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is what wins (or sometimes you just get lucky). Your cooking annoyance is a good place to do thought experiments. I don't always want to cook, but in cases where I don't want to cook I don't always want to go out. Proposed solution: Get my neighbours to cook for me. It's a good idea, but after you investigated, it was infeasible. There are two ways you can go with this. First, you now have a new annoyance: normal people can't sell their own food creations without poisoning people (or, alternatively, the government discourages people poisoning each other :-) ). Nothing is saying that you have to stay with your original annoyance. You can move. And since this is a thought experiment, maybe you might come up with another idea and investigate that. If it doesn't pan out, then you will get new annoyances. This technique is pretty similar to Toyota's "5 whys". Before they decide on how to fix a problem they first ask why the problem exists. When they answer that question, they ask why that situation exists. They go down 5 times (I don't think that number is actually carved out in stone, but you get the idea). At that point they have a much better idea of the situation and can choose the most effective place to solve their problem. But you may come to a realisation that "getting my neighbours to cook for me" is not going to be feasible -- and that nothing down that chain is going to work out. That's not a problem, because it's not the only solution to the problem. For example (and feel free to steal this idea) I live in Japan and my wife was ill the other day. Normally she makes me a packed lunch. I was too busy with work to return the favour, so instead I went to the convenience store and bought some instant ramen. You may have eaten instant ramen before. When I lived in Canada, I learned how horrible it is. But in Japan, if you spend $2 instead of $1 the instant ramen is pretty freaking good. If you spend $3 instead of $2, it's almost as good as I can make myself (the only real downside is that the toppings are not really numerous enough). I thought to myself, "I wonder if I could export these amazing ramen soups to the US. I'm sure you can get them in specialty stores, but this is absolutely ripe for exploitation on the web. These things weigh nothing and they will ship perfectly. And they don't rot in any reasonable time frame. Why the heck is there not anything like this?" So I did my 5 why's and realised that if you want to do it, you have to be in the US (or wherever you want to sell) because you need to order container sized amounts to make the overseas shipping reasonable. This means you need a distribution centre at the destination. But I absolutely guarantee that Nissin (or whoever you want to talk to) would be thrilled to sell you a container of ramen, with which you can do a "Ramen of the week club" on the internet (surely this already exists... surely... I haven't actually checked). Anyway, that's an example. Don't give up is the answer. One idea is nothing. Let it go. Use it to inform your next move. Keep going and never stop. Edit: I just had a quick look. There are internet ramen clubs, but their ramen is all crap. Ripe for disruption -- look for ramen in a bowl shaped container. Edit Edit: Darn: https://japanramenbox.com https://japanramenbox.com This is exactly what I was thinking. Hope they do well (though you might be able to undercut them ;-) ).

jen729w 9y ago

I feel like people - us, here, on this forum - sometimes think too big. Like, we have to invent the new Facebook or it’s not worth it. I think that can cripple our thinking. (Obviously I’m massively generalising. I’m not having a dig at anyone here.) I’ve realised recently that there’s good money to be made solving little problems. Not Zuckerberg money, but who wants that lifestyle. Ramen money. Example: my partner is a medical copywriter. Some jobs, she spends hours reformatting journal citations. All she’s doing is making part of it italic, making sure the dashes are all en-dashes, whatever. How many medical copywriters are there? How many people have this problem? Now, it’s not a life-changing thing, but it’s what computers are for! So we’re building a little tool that will make this easier for us. What’s our goal? I don’t know. To make enough to pay our rent? That’d be lovely for starters and what is that, a thousand people giving us $5/month each? That’s nothing. It also helps, of course, that she’s in this industry. She knows where to go to find other people with the same problem. Solve something in your domain, and everything’s going to be easier. (It’s also why I’m not afraid of telling everyone here what the idea is. Chances of someone else being passionate and knowledgeable about this, enough to steal the idea, are near nil.) That’s where my head’s at, and it makes thinking about this stuff much easier for me, at least.

pryelluw 9y ago
Yes, that is a good approach. Remember that making money is about buying your freedom to survive. You can do so without being a millionaire.
HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
This sort of problem is everywhere. I can recall back in the old Business of Software forum on joelonsoftware when I pointed out that I was digging in my garden and came across a grub. Since I was thinking about the people who said they could never "think of business ideas" I wondered if there was software that had something to do with grubs and bugs. Less than a minute on google and I had pages of Pest Management Software. The moral of the story was that if I could come up with software business ideas while digging in the dirt, it shouldn't be that hard to see opportunities all around.

murukesh_s 9y ago

Having a pain point and validating it with a set of other users is a good vector for success. While that is true I have seen/heard/read many ideas that are brainstormed in a room and selected at random becoming widely successful. Anyway, regarding food you could have thought about a machine/robot based solution, at least to begin with :)

mft_ 9y ago
I disagree. Many people lack the vision, or sometimes the same negative experience to understand that something needs changing, of people with the original idea. And people often default to the negative, in my experience. Brainstorm Uber with a group of people and you'd get challenges that taxis already exist and are fine, that laws stand in your way, and that people wouldn't want to get in a stranger's car. Or to misquote (I think?) Steve Jobs, if Henry Ford had asked his users what they'd wanted before building the Model T, they'd have asked for a faster horse.

tathougies 9y ago

I mean... you may not be able to distribute food, but as far as I know, it's certainly not illegal to create a social networking app where someone can say "I'm interested in a sandwich" and another person says "I'll make you a sandwich for $5". If Tinder is legal, I don't see how that could not be.

goatherders 9y ago
Because Tinder isnt bound by the FDA or any commercial food distribution regulations. Try again.
- tathougies 9y ago
  Neither is connecting people to cook food for each other. If your tinder date cooks you breakfast, has anyone run afoul of food safety laws? You can't be a food distributor if you're not distributing food. I've gone to our local small business seminars for food service, and I've been told that as long as you're not handling food at any point, you can't be held responsible.
ShannonAlther 9y ago
I'm also in the "everything is kind of okay in my workflow" boat. One of the major problems I hear about and encounter frequently is that biotech is a painful industry. Creating and selling new drugs takes decades and costs millions of dollars. This isn't some immutable law of pharmacology, it's because drugs have to be approved by regulatory agencies like the FDA, and no amount of clever engineering is going to make clinical trials less onerous. I think just about every industry that seems, from the outside, to have exploitable conditions like this has hidden barriers. The taxi industry looked exploitable, but in fact was tightly regulated. Uber has managed to capture some of the market by pretending to not be a taxi company, and wound up in a plethora of legal battles for their trouble. I propose that how obvious or necessary a business idea appears at first glance is directly proportional to how difficult it would be to implement.

shubhamjain 9y ago

I would suggest trying to think about what task your team has to do often that is better done by a software--a minor but recurring annoyance. Like, in my case, - Backend and Frontend development are never in sync, so we have to resort to mocking the API by using dummy code. There are API mocking services, but I would prefer something that mocks locally. Charles Proxy is great for this but it can be limiting and isn't very intuitive. - Every time our customers face an obscure issue with the product, there's plenty of to and fro to understand the root cause of the issue. If there was a product that could tell us the trail of actions that the customers followed, it'll make debugging vastly easier. Of course, there's a world of difference in recognizing the problem and creating a sustainable product. But, every organization is inefficient in some sort of way. It's just a matter of observing carefully.

enz 9y ago
> If there was a product that could tell us the trail of actions that the customers followed, it'll make debugging vastly easier. Sentry.io may be a good start, perhaps?

ed 9y ago

Find something new-ish (e.g. AI, cryptocurrencies), and learn as much as possible about that thing (like, build a toy version of it, get an intuitive understanding of its parts). Product ideas and applications will jump out at you. The kind of ideas you get when you're deliberately trying to come up with ideas, are always obvious and often startup cliches (like food delivery).

adwn 9y ago
> AI, cryptocurrencies [...] The kind of ideas you get when you're deliberately trying to come up with ideas, are always obvious and often startup cliches (like food delivery). I would say that AI and cryptocurrencies are the startup clichés of today. Don't start with a solution in search of a problem. Instead, start with a problem, and see if you can find a solution. When comparing problem-solution pairs, discount those that involve trendy, hyped technologies, to account for mental bias.
- ed 9y ago
  > I would say that AI and cryptocurrencies are the startup clichés of today. To say they're cliche suggests we've exhausted all ideas in the space which we definitely have not.

rorykoehler 9y ago

>Can you crowdsource cooking from your neighbors? They have what is essentially this service in Singapore. Professional kitchens that make home cooked meals. Very popular.

meheleventyone 9y ago
Professional kitchens doing home delivery isn’t a new concept though. The OP wanted to scale it in the mode of AirBnB or Uber where margins are reduced by replacing professional staff and rented locations with itinerant labour providing their own setup and shouldering much of the risk.
- rorykoehler 9y ago
  Not at all but they have been enabled by Internet technologies and the cultural change brought about by Internet technologies.

chrischen 9y ago

I built Instapainting.com to serve customers and have not personally had a reason to use the service myself. Essentially I have to do more guesswork and testing, but it can be done. Not all services have to be built to satisfy your own needs, and arguably at some point all services must grow to beyond one’s own needs. So it’s a necessary skill to develop and required at some point to grow and serve new niches or new use cases or markets.

Kagerjay 9y ago
I read through your indiehackers post and it was very interesting to see your approach on SEO, e.g. viral marketing with interesting side projects

kiksy 9y ago

From your example you came across a nested problem with the safety regulations. What about building something trying to ease the pain and streamline getting the required permits to cook domestically?

cornholio 9y ago

I'm exceptionally lazy and always feel the need more machines. I need a machine that washes and flosses my teeth fast and thoroughly, I waste 15-20 minutes each day doing that. I need a robotic dishwasher/cupboard cabinet that I simply open the lid, trow the dirty plates then simply pick them up clean from the adjacent cupboard. Ditto for dry, ironed laundry. I need a food printer with attached smart refrigerator that I can download my favorite recipes into and will order the necessary ingredients and automatically cook the meal at the programmed time. A flying machine, oh man, how much I need a flying machine. Ok, maybe those are grand ideas that need billions of dollars of research, but any one of those involves a myriad of smaller improvements that can turn into startup products. The potential for improving our lives is so vast I cannot imagine how could anyone say "I have everything I need".

vinceguidry 9y ago
Between a WaterPik flosser and a Sonicare electric toothbrush, I've knocked my daily dental hygiene time down to like 4 minutes. It would be really hard to improve on that combo.
- animal531 9y ago
  What about something you just bite onto (a bit like a boxer's mouthguard) that cleans your teeth while you're doing something else? Then it's down to effectively 15 seconds.
  - vinceguidry 9y ago
    I didn't say it was impossible.
  - bronco21016 9y ago
    Apparently 3 seconds. [1] [1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/unico-smartbrush--3#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/unico-smartbrush--3#/
animal531 9y ago
Also fun idea, why should you have a cupboard to store your china and silverware etc in? Why not just have the washer also be the storage, then you just walk up to it and select e.g. plate + fork on the frontend and it spits out a clean pair for you. When you're done you place them back in and they're washed and stored for later use. Same for the clothing, although in that case one might argue that a lady might enjoy the display of the product and wants to physically see them. Ideally in the (small) house of the future the tighter packing allowed by the machine might be a great advantage.

vinceguidry 9y ago

You're not thinking about problems hard enough. Instead just giving up when something sounds vaguely hard. Get rid of the vagueness, figure out exactly how hard it is. As per your example, have you done the research concerning health codes and what sorts of operations violate them and which don't? I'm pretty sure off the top of my head that if you're not actually selling food, as in taking in payments and delivering food, you're not on the hook for what other people are doing in their homes. So I can envision a service facilitating neighborhood meal swaps. The state might not exactly like it, but it won't have anyone to go after for health code violations. This is pretty much exactly what Uber did, they kept toeing ever closer to the line of the actually illegal until they had both the legal budget and a public mandate to fight City Hall.

Erlich_Bachman 9y ago

Regarding your specific problem, maybe it's not as grim as you see, you just have to think bigger and farther ahead: I am talking of course about Robot Kitchens. After automated driving this will probably be the next big frontier. This seems to be the state of the art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNcPVvIs_tk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNcPVvIs_tk http://www.moley.com/about-us/ http://www.moley.com/about-us/ They state that the consumer version is set to launch in 2018. It will probably take several more years to work out all the kinks. But this is likely the actual future of cooking, not the local outsourcing.

Cactus2018 9y ago

Crowdsource cooking from neighbors startup 'Josephine' recently shutdown https://medium.com/the-dish/continuing-the-home-cooking-movement-8d28bb1cd496 https://medium.com/the-dish/continuing-the-home-cooking-move...

bluedino 9y ago

In case you haven’t noticed, Uber, AirBnB don’t care about regulations

thisisit 9y ago

I came around to this couple of days late, so I don't know if it's worth it but here's my take on it. Your identified problem was - Don't like cooking and don't want to eat outside. The solution you had was - crowdsource cooking. But how about looking it in another way? What do you disliked more - cooking or unhealthy outside food? I dislike cooking. One of the issues with cooking is that prep, measurement and deciding menu takes time. Lot of times I am stuck with - what to cook today? So, how do we solve this problem? Meal Kits. I know they still don't take away from the fact that you need to cook. But it is similar to getting food from outside, even if they are your neighbor. So, it is not only the problem but solution that matters as well.