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The author's success commercializing something that he needed chimed with me. I feel like this is a common thing - kinda like the old adage you'd hear at schoo

The author's success commercializing something that he needed chimed with me. I feel like this is a common thing - kinda like the old adage you'd hear at school that goes something like "if you have a question about something, chances are at least a couple of other people in class have the same question". I wonder how many startups that are "think of it as an uber-for-...." are there because of actual genuine & real needs that people have, or just that people think will make them rich. A decade-plus ago I was in the same situation as the author - a problem that I had and no obvious simple solution that I could find. I ended up admitting that the thing I was looking for didn't exist, so I made it (website in this case so very small risk/outlay). It made a boat load of income from ad revenue back when CPMs were better (still exists these days but revenue is way way down on what it was - perhaps less than <5% - and my regular work salary these days totally eclipses even what it was at its peak anyway). There must be so many of these sorts of stories on HN - someone scratching their own itch, only to find out that others have the same.

brianwawok 6y ago
Scratching your own itch is def a path, but not the path all of us take. Like I doubt anyone has ever had their own itch for “garbage truck fleet management software “, but I’m sure there is money in it. Or I suppose people have parents / family in the garbage truck industry, so you can “scratch a relatives itch”. Personally my SaaS has nothing to do with myself nor anyone I know, but it’s an opportunity of weak software I found. I assume this is also a path people go down...
- justwalt 6y ago
  There’s another in-between case, where the people who decided to make garbage truck fleet management software noticed that there was a massive inefficiency firsthand, and decided to fix it. I imagine this is a great avenue for people who have both programming knowledge and experience in a separate domain.
- jimcsharp 6y ago
  >scratch a relatives itch I count myself extremely lucky to have found an 'ideas guy' (and people person, and bookkeeper, money raiser, etc etc...) who came out of the world of the 90s and 2000's where he'd fly around the world implementing copies of high touch software. From day 1 his vision was clear, we had an in-house subject matter expert, and the customers were there when our SaaS was ready.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    It's interesting that nobody really talks about this. The experience or knowledge of a problem seems like an extremely important aspect of starting a business, but it's often talked about as being "generated" or thought up. The more I've worked on my own idea, the more I've realized that I needed to better understand the problem space and refine my vision.
- hksh 6y ago
  I realize your example that no one has the itch for garbage truck fleet management software, but I found myself (via my wife) in that exact situation about 3.5 years ago. She had founded a company providing food waste collection with composting on the backend and it became apparent very quickly in the market-testing phase that the challenges were rooted in logistics for consumer pickup and less in converting customers or processing (at least for our area in New Hampshire). After a couple weeks of her manually designing pickup routes for the "fleet" I hacked together a demo using TIGER data and OR-tools that planned routes (with autogen'd tick-sheets) and calculated a rudimentary cost-per-mile. While it wasn't saving game-changing amounts of time over her initial route optimizations, removing the manual overhead of generating routes on a daily basis was a big win. I would say it became a "fleet management" project (if you can call 2 cars, a trailer, and the occasional rental to pick up the slack a fleet) after one of the drivers suddenly heard a "grinding" sound while on route 5 miles from the nearest gas station. Based on the description I guessed that the transmission was dying and had them check the fluid. It didn't register on the dip stick so she dispatched another vehicle to tow back the trailer while the other one limped to the shop. The offending vehicle was one of the fraudulent VW TDI's that just had to get to the dealer's lot for the trade-in value (our goal had been to _barely_ get there under it's own power and it seemed we went a bit too far :) ). "Too far" was using it to tow ~1200# of compost 4 days a week for 6 months with what we determined to be one oil change at the beginning of that period. This experience led to adding a step to the route planning calendar events for maintenance checks for the vehicles in the "fleet" based on their current and expected mileage. There were a bunch of things that I (in my night-time, engineering resource capacity) wanted to add to the system (tracking with GPS built into car, RFID readers in car and on bucket/totes to remove driver's manual annotations, CANbus diagnostic readout to identify early issues) but before any of those got off the ground she sold the company (hooray!) when we found out she was pregnant with twins and she realized she was way more interested in the physical composting work than the cost-center minimization of the drivers and the fleet anyway.
  - dualthro 6y ago
    Awesome to see how a tiny convenience fix can turn into something much more substantive. Thanks for sharing.

brianwawok 6y ago

Scratching your own itch is def a path, but not the path all of us take. Like I doubt anyone has ever had their own itch for “garbage truck fleet management software “, but I’m sure there is money in it. Or I suppose people have parents / family in the garbage truck industry, so you can “scratch a relatives itch”. Personally my SaaS has nothing to do with myself nor anyone I know, but it’s an opportunity of weak software I found. I assume this is also a path people go down...

justwalt 6y ago
There’s another in-between case, where the people who decided to make garbage truck fleet management software noticed that there was a massive inefficiency firsthand, and decided to fix it. I imagine this is a great avenue for people who have both programming knowledge and experience in a separate domain.
jimcsharp 6y ago
>scratch a relatives itch I count myself extremely lucky to have found an 'ideas guy' (and people person, and bookkeeper, money raiser, etc etc...) who came out of the world of the 90s and 2000's where he'd fly around the world implementing copies of high touch software. From day 1 his vision was clear, we had an in-house subject matter expert, and the customers were there when our SaaS was ready.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  It's interesting that nobody really talks about this. The experience or knowledge of a problem seems like an extremely important aspect of starting a business, but it's often talked about as being "generated" or thought up. The more I've worked on my own idea, the more I've realized that I needed to better understand the problem space and refine my vision.
hksh 6y ago
I realize your example that no one has the itch for garbage truck fleet management software, but I found myself (via my wife) in that exact situation about 3.5 years ago. She had founded a company providing food waste collection with composting on the backend and it became apparent very quickly in the market-testing phase that the challenges were rooted in logistics for consumer pickup and less in converting customers or processing (at least for our area in New Hampshire). After a couple weeks of her manually designing pickup routes for the "fleet" I hacked together a demo using TIGER data and OR-tools that planned routes (with autogen'd tick-sheets) and calculated a rudimentary cost-per-mile. While it wasn't saving game-changing amounts of time over her initial route optimizations, removing the manual overhead of generating routes on a daily basis was a big win. I would say it became a "fleet management" project (if you can call 2 cars, a trailer, and the occasional rental to pick up the slack a fleet) after one of the drivers suddenly heard a "grinding" sound while on route 5 miles from the nearest gas station. Based on the description I guessed that the transmission was dying and had them check the fluid. It didn't register on the dip stick so she dispatched another vehicle to tow back the trailer while the other one limped to the shop. The offending vehicle was one of the fraudulent VW TDI's that just had to get to the dealer's lot for the trade-in value (our goal had been to _barely_ get there under it's own power and it seemed we went a bit too far :) ). "Too far" was using it to tow ~1200# of compost 4 days a week for 6 months with what we determined to be one oil change at the beginning of that period. This experience led to adding a step to the route planning calendar events for maintenance checks for the vehicles in the "fleet" based on their current and expected mileage. There were a bunch of things that I (in my night-time, engineering resource capacity) wanted to add to the system (tracking with GPS built into car, RFID readers in car and on bucket/totes to remove driver's manual annotations, CANbus diagnostic readout to identify early issues) but before any of those got off the ground she sold the company (hooray!) when we found out she was pregnant with twins and she realized she was way more interested in the physical composting work than the cost-center minimization of the drivers and the fleet anyway.
- dualthro 6y ago
  Awesome to see how a tiny convenience fix can turn into something much more substantive. Thanks for sharing.