Ask HN: How to find a problem a solo founder could and would want to solve?

How many companies have you worked for in your career? How many different places have you lived? Different experiences?

I've found that ideas for new apps or products come from my previous jobs and from things that I see as 'missing' or weak in these jobs. From my way of life and things I see as 'missing' there. And from my partners work and things I see as she talks to me about it.

I work as a contractor and I've worked for 10 or so companies in the past 8 years. At almost every company I've found things that don't work well and sometimes ideas for products to build.

We've bounced around a lot between Spain, the Canary Islands, and Ireland during Covid and I have some ideas based on that for companies that should exist but don't.

Ideas flow from diversity of experience and from where those experiences intersect. If you've worked for the same company for 10 years, lived in the same place, and done the same things every week and month, you lack that diversity.

I'm currently building a tool for developers working with healthcare APIs. ( https://vanyalabs.com/ ↗ ) The idea came to me a few weeks into a new contract working for a healthcare company last year. It's a big app, but it's not too big for one developer to make a start on.

edit: As for search engines, I was thinking about building a search engine for finance / private equity companies a few years ago. Very specific and very niche, but something that I felt my partner and her company would benefit from and pay for. (the idea is still an idea) Around the same time I met a guy who was working for a 2 person startup building a search engine for medical workers.

Your worldview is ok. Slightly non-friendly, but ok.

Real problem is globalization.

- In the past, also most problems fall in the same 3 categories, but not existed internet and people does not traveled as much as now. So, in most cases, if you suffer such problems in past, you just moved to other city and there you easily found paid customers.

Now, everybody have access to internet and to fast/cheap world transport, so too many people could just buy something cheaper from somewhere, and you have to deal with this.

But if you will not stuck in making something valuable for everyone in whole world, you could find some niches and live making something valuable for them.

And you will make mistake if avoid such niches. Because, even them are small, but this littleness deter large companies from them. So living in niche you will be safe for significant time, before you will accumulate resources to enter open market.

For example, from words of Wallmart founder, Sam Watson, they occasionally started on periphery, where non existed large, dangerous concurrents, and than they slowly accumulated resources and created finance backbone, so later they easily conquered large cities.

Sure, all that time you should study, you should train your intellect and imagination, so you will see more opportunities. But this is next step, first you must accept truth, that you don't need to start large.

To be honest, sometimes appear humans, who start large and win, but mostly this is exception, not rule.

I can give you a concrete example if that helps.

I looked at the "secrets automation" space and my background is cryptography and web development.

I'm a solo developer so when I look at a problem I have to make the solution small enough that I can actually build it.

I also have to have an idea about how I will get people to use my product i.e. marketing.

In my case 1Password raised 620million in funding based on their acquisition of Secretshub which for me proves there is a market in secrets automation for developers.

I looked at the secretshub product and I was confident I could build it better with easier to use encryption and make it open source.

As the market is developers I feel writing blog articles about software development will give me a route to market.

So I started about 4 months ago. The product is now here https://cloak.software ↗ and source code is here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak ↗

My first article about web development with rust has already had 16K views so I'm confident with the marketing approach. Now the hard works starts of turning visitors into paying users.

Hope this helps.

I think its more about the distribution and customer than the product. If you have those two, a product would come to you naturally.

For instance, suppose your father is a dentist. Just take a look at the shitty dentist software they're using. Or maybe some process with dealing with notes, or customers, or whatever. I'm sure some of those processes could be improved through technology. Learn what he needs, build software around that, and try to get in the mindset of a dentist. Expand the network to his dentist friends and go from there.

You can do this without have a connection to dentistry but it would be a lot harder. You can build the product, but you'd have a lot of blind spots. Maybe some of the antiquated processes exist that way for a reason. You may not know the mindset of a dentist. Are you just going to go door to door trying to sell to dentists?

Figure out what distribution you channel you have access to and focus on that. That's why you see a lot of dev tooling, because devs know how to solicit and sell to other devs. Whereas the intersect of knowledge of dentistry, software background, entrepreneurial risk profile and access to distribution is much rarer, and you can tell by some of their processes.

I think it's good to be full of more ideas than you could pursue in a lifetime, before becoming a solo founder.

It's just one of the things you have to depend more strongly on yourself for.

If your ambition is to have lots of employees eventually anyway, you should have plans for more than enough work to keep them all productively in action.

1. A high-performing solo operator will often be capable of outperforming a small team of established workers doing acceptable work elsewhere, especially considering technology or motivational advantages.

2. More money will always be capable of being made from meaningless BS. Until you have the most meaningful offerings you may need to sell things that are only somewhat meaningful for a while. You're going to need a strong marketing effort no matter what and as long as you're committed to no BS and giving the client their money's worth, nobody will think you are shady.

3. Some things are so massive and so important that it's best for most people not to rule them out entirely. Sometimes you can't afford not to address things that are too big to handle solo.