This may sound naive but has anyone got any advice or links to advice on the best way to find real problems to solve, big or small. Preferably small, though because with the big ones its often harder to tell whether they are something that people really want. I'm looking for a way of finding the kinds of things where its relatively easy to tell whether they have a good chance of making some money right now. Its a tall order,I know but you never know what people know until you ask.
"How do I find business problems to solve" is answered a few times over, from different angles, in Ed's comments collected there. I'm not going to tell you which answers exactly, because you should probably read the whole thing.
Rob Walling (http://www.softwarebyrob.com/) has a book called 'Start Small, Stay Small' that sounds like what you are looking for. He talks about finding a problem to solve, and has lots of practical tips and advice on how to determine if there is a market for the solution.
I think it's best to tackle a small problem in a big space. Like helping people track their weight, which is small in scope, but the number of people who need to lose weight is gigantic. That way, you can gradually increase in scope as you gain more traction, instead of being limited.
Find a big problem, identify a basis for its vector space, and build that basis.
My opinion is that all "small problems with simple solutions" that have become successful were actually cases of big problems masquerading as small ones.
>You need to start with anything, NOW. No excuses. //
So I've got a problem and an outline solution. I just need R&D capital and a few months in a workshop to create a prototype, get a patent and then take that looking for investments ...
How do I start "NOW" with what I have, no money, no time, no workshop.
Time I can probably manage a little of, but then I use HN for relaxation when I'm tired so it's not really productive time that I'm using up. The project is nothing without capital and a workshop; just dead.
Sure there's other things to do but then I'm giving up on the project and that would be falling to the point you attacked that to do X [this project] I need Y and Z.
That could be true but I think that very few people really have that talent. Most people have only one or two good ideas and those come from observing something in a domain that they are in. That's why pg gives the advice to work on something you know about because no doubt he has observed the relative success rate of people who work on things inside and outside of their domains. I think there may be a few people who do have the talent to find problems outside of their immediate domain but I also think that like any 'talent' its probably something you could learn and develop by observing those people, how they think, what they do etc.
This might be a great article and I wouldn't even know it. I can't get past the first few sentences because it is thoroughly riddled with typos, missing capitalizations, and other careless errors that would've been fixed if this post wasn't written free-thought and was re-read before publishing.
Try presenting yourself professionally online. Often times what you say is just as important as how you say it.
This hit home for me. Previously we had identified a problem, but instead of just getting out there and getting started with the quickest working solution, we spent ages building a fully comprehensive service that did it all and more. The outcome: we wasted resources building things we didnt need and werent used, while our competitors sailed off into the sunset.
