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Well, picking one of my ideas at random: I've always been amazed at how poor companies are at simple timesheet tracking. For example, the company I'm at now is

Well, picking one of my ideas at random: I've always been amazed at how poor companies are at simple timesheet tracking. For example, the company I'm at now is a s/w dev company and we are still expected to fill in bloody Excel forms for managing time spent on specific projects/customers. We also have to fill in holiday forms in Excel, with the result that people (including my manager) never know when I'm on holiday until they are surprised by the Out of Office email reply. So - a simple time tracking system, then. I would probably make a SaaS version online, and one which you could purchase and install locally yourself (or pay me to come and set up for you). And we can assume that it's going to be the awesome of awesomeness. I'd probably write enough of it to make a minimally viable product that looks juicy and could take to customers. How would I go about finding these potential customers? Do I have to go door to door in my local area? Google Ad-words?

jacques_chester 13y ago
Time tracking is a fairly competitive market. There are hundreds, probably of thousands of solutions that you will be directly or indirectly competing with. On the other hand, the market is very large and there's lots of room for different companies. I haven't seen a variation so far that doesn't annoy me.
petercooper 13y ago
See, the reason it's interesting to learn that is most of the things I do are aimed at developers, so finding developer groups is really easy. I'm not experienced in the general business networking world but there are certainly things like local chambers of commerce, freelancing groups, and general networking groups to attend. patio11 has more insight and practical advice on this sort of stuff than I can offer. A recent comment of his, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657402 .. although I imagine jumping in head first to creating a local event is probably not what you want to do (yet).

jacques_chester 13y ago

Time tracking is a fairly competitive market. There are hundreds, probably of thousands of solutions that you will be directly or indirectly competing with. On the other hand, the market is very large and there's lots of room for different companies. I haven't seen a variation so far that doesn't annoy me.

petercooper 13y ago

See, the reason it's interesting to learn that is most of the things I do are aimed at developers, so finding developer groups is really easy. I'm not experienced in the general business networking world but there are certainly things like local chambers of commerce, freelancing groups, and general networking groups to attend. patio11 has more insight and practical advice on this sort of stuff than I can offer. A recent comment of his, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657402 .. although I imagine jumping in head first to creating a local event is probably not what you want to do (yet).