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Nice work on a cool side project! Just my 2c, but I would find this more useful as a place to validate and support early pain-points, as opposed to solutions. V

by pea 4y ago

Nice work on a cool side project! Just my 2c, but I would find this more useful as a place to validate and support early pain-points, as opposed to solutions. Validating that a genuine burning pain exists for a small group of people - with access to early adopters - would be really helpful, and I think would provide a nice play to do discovery. Going solution-first puts the cart before the horse imo.

leobg 4y ago
Ok. Wow. That's interesting. I never thought about it from this angle. Can you give an example? I mean a pain point that you would like to validate, or would have liked to in the past, if such a tool had existed?
- pea 4y ago
  I think many compelling companies come from rigorously testing lots of possible solutions for a problem that the founders understand deeply. You might experiment and fail with 10 different ways to solve that problem, before one of them sticks. But the important thing for building the right solution is understanding the context, situation, nature of the pain-point, implications of it, and why the world would be better served if it was solved. The benefit of solving your own painpoint is that you often understand these things instinctively, but it's helpful to talk to other people to understand how it is different for them. From there, the first solutions should be to validate this -- maybe the first version is a Google form or a manual inbox (i.e. "What can we test in 1 week vs. 1 year?"). For an example from me, I previously had a start-up where we provided version control for PowerPoint documents. Our first iteration was way too complicated and we went in solution-first. We built all kinds of shit people didn't need, like slide-by-slide version control, git integration, etc. On your current site, I could ask people if they want a plugin into PowerPoint which gives slide-by-slide version control using git, and get a bunch of feedback on that specific solution. Instead, it would be more helpful to step back and try and validate that sharing PowerPoint documents over email leads to versioning problems. From there, maybe I could dig deeper into specific use-cases, verticals, and understand a wider problem space, before talking about how people need the problem to be solved. I think the learnings would be 100x more useful than getting some specific feedback on my myopic solution. Similarly, I have found that users often love talking about their problems more than they love giving feedback on individual solutions.
  - leobg 4y ago
    You are right. It makes sense to first validate that you're targeting the correct destination, versus validating a particular route to a destination. It would be great to have something like an atlas of problems. And you, both as user and as provider, can zoom in on the topics that are important to you. Because just having one long list of disconnected problems mixed together from various domains, from photography over machine learning to marketing will just fry your brain. I like your idea. And I agree that it would be great if something like that existed. Like a Hacker News for problems. Have you seen any site/app that comes close to this? Perhaps even just localized to one domain?
PookMook 4y ago
I made what you describe a few years ago on a coding stream during a weekend. https://makeithappen.dev/ https://makeithappen.dev/ was the place, everything about the site is horrible but I liked the idea, maybe it's a thing I could revisit someday.
s1k3 4y ago
Yea man I’ve thought about this too. For it to work you almost need to make it a marketplace to entice people to come forward with their problems. Kind of like “I’ve got this problem can someone help me?” And then you have a whole bunch of entrepreneurs looking at all the problems picking them up as needed.

by pea 4y ago

leobg 4y ago

Ok. Wow. That's interesting. I never thought about it from this angle. Can you give an example? I mean a pain point that you would like to validate, or would have liked to in the past, if such a tool had existed?

pea 4y ago
I think many compelling companies come from rigorously testing lots of possible solutions for a problem that the founders understand deeply. You might experiment and fail with 10 different ways to solve that problem, before one of them sticks. But the important thing for building the right solution is understanding the context, situation, nature of the pain-point, implications of it, and why the world would be better served if it was solved. The benefit of solving your own painpoint is that you often understand these things instinctively, but it's helpful to talk to other people to understand how it is different for them. From there, the first solutions should be to validate this -- maybe the first version is a Google form or a manual inbox (i.e. "What can we test in 1 week vs. 1 year?"). For an example from me, I previously had a start-up where we provided version control for PowerPoint documents. Our first iteration was way too complicated and we went in solution-first. We built all kinds of shit people didn't need, like slide-by-slide version control, git integration, etc. On your current site, I could ask people if they want a plugin into PowerPoint which gives slide-by-slide version control using git, and get a bunch of feedback on that specific solution. Instead, it would be more helpful to step back and try and validate that sharing PowerPoint documents over email leads to versioning problems. From there, maybe I could dig deeper into specific use-cases, verticals, and understand a wider problem space, before talking about how people need the problem to be solved. I think the learnings would be 100x more useful than getting some specific feedback on my myopic solution. Similarly, I have found that users often love talking about their problems more than they love giving feedback on individual solutions.
- leobg 4y ago
  You are right. It makes sense to first validate that you're targeting the correct destination, versus validating a particular route to a destination. It would be great to have something like an atlas of problems. And you, both as user and as provider, can zoom in on the topics that are important to you. Because just having one long list of disconnected problems mixed together from various domains, from photography over machine learning to marketing will just fry your brain. I like your idea. And I agree that it would be great if something like that existed. Like a Hacker News for problems. Have you seen any site/app that comes close to this? Perhaps even just localized to one domain?

PookMook 4y ago

I made what you describe a few years ago on a coding stream during a weekend. https://makeithappen.dev/ https://makeithappen.dev/ was the place, everything about the site is horrible but I liked the idea, maybe it's a thing I could revisit someday.

s1k3 4y ago

Yea man I’ve thought about this too. For it to work you almost need to make it a marketplace to entice people to come forward with their problems. Kind of like “I’ve got this problem can someone help me?” And then you have a whole bunch of entrepreneurs looking at all the problems picking them up as needed.