3 ms·

Instead of making something people want, make something that you want first. Solve your own problem. 6B people in the world, I am sure someone will have the exa

• mattmanser 17y ago
  The biggest problem with this meme, that 37 signals seem to be a champion for, is that the kind of problems that hackers have are also pretty easily solved by the same kind of people. And so the hacker problem space is often over-run by others and open source software. A recent case in point: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740789 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740789 But take patio11's company, which solves a problem that none of us probably thought existed, the bingo card creator. Suddenly you have a nice big audience for a fairly simple program, but because it's the kind of problem that hacker community never comes into contact with it's nice and profitable. So I'd be careful on following this advice unless you're a truly amazing hacker (e.g. afaik 37signal's guy wrote the rails part of ruby on rails). The bar is much higher in the hacker problem space and has to be because in the end, the 'I could write that in a weekend' syndrome often prevails :)