OK, a few observations: 1. Not sure HN is the best place to ask this. Yes, there are plenty of start ups here and entrepreneurs, however, they are all busy jus

OK, a few observations: 1. Not sure HN is the best place to ask this. Yes, there are plenty of start ups here and entrepreneurs, however, they are all busy just like you finding ideas 2. Go where business owners hang out who don't necessary have the tech skills in house to solve their problems. 3. Start smoking cigars I pick up a cigar every now and then and head over to any nicer establishment with a good bar, good scotch, atmosphere and where people mingle. 1. The people I meet at cigar places are typically business owners...and not in tech. They own manufacturing businesses, finance, retail and other low tech brick and mortar type businesses who have a need for tech but typically none in house. 2. Cigar smokers love talking to other cigar smokers, even when you are a complete stranger. Also, smoking a cigar takes 1 - 2 hours...so you got them pinned. Start the conversation soft, casual...just like dating. Then start finding out more about them, what they do. Ask some simple questions about their field and let them explain as if they are pure genius. Start talking about their business...and now you start narrowing down on problems, issues. I do this all the time. It's amazing what you can learn...and they'll love to tell you about it because they are having a good time smoking cigars, sipping scotch and hiding from the wife. I just recently spoke to a small retail owner who has a chain of consignment stores with a number of POS systems. Buying a POS system isn't a problem, it's doing the financial reporting and consolidating data from multiple locations. He had been looking for quite some time and couldn't find anything good that actually could understand that data came from multiple locations, rather than multiple POSs inside the same store. He also had a huge number of different SKUs since no item coming in is the same as any other in a consignment store. Who knew...I would have thought this was a solved problem. It's a totally un-sexy space but I really think this is where you'll find you best ideas.