I'm guessing the majority of readers here are not self-employed or actively working on startups, and most niche-identifying-problems stem from the work place. I'll start...
I want to be able to scribe meeting notes and have them recorded digitally for circulation to colleagues and CRM systems. This could take the form of a printed note-taking template, where by OCR could determine different sections (attendees, date, actions, notes) when scanning them in. It is not good etiquette (here) to scribe notes on a laptop during a meeting, and typing them up by hand is very time consuming.
What are your problems?
1) It's too cold in Moscow. The gray sky sucks.
2) I fall sick easily. Now slowly recovering from a brutal case of stomatitis.
3) I can't easily find new people to play music together in a casual setting. I'd do this every couple days if it were simple.
4) Whenever I have >1 concurrent girlfriend, I have trouble separating them. Shutting off the phone sucks. Three girls at once give me so many worries that I wonder why I even bother.
5) Getting visas to foreign countries sucks, and air tickets are too expensive. Okay I can live with the ticket prices - my salary is high enough - but the visa humiliations are too much for me. You Americans have no idea.
6) The Flash platform is really poorly documented around the edges. I'd love to see something like quirksmode.org for Flash.
7) I can't seem to wake up early.
I have a vision. A vision of the first screenplay ever to be based on a bestselling iPhone application.
This is a problem? :-) There are actually several web applications to help people get into that sort of situation.
Seriously, doesn't caller ID help this situation? Maybe you could convince them all to download a location-based app so you can track them and see when two are headed to your apartment at the same time.
I've actually got a website for this one. But I still need to learn a programming language to write an app to go with it. :(
Try asking people in industries that rarely interface with the tech world. That's where you find the big, underserved problems.
Most of us could probably spend a single day in the office of a company in a different industry and pick out a handful of ideas on ways they could improve their processes, or speedup tasks, or cutout waste. Not all of those ideas will require a technology-based solution, but surely a few of them will.
If you really want to find good problems to solve, try working as a temp for a few weeks. Ask lots of questions and make notes, I'm sure you'll find plenty of work to do.
Maybe that's a good startup idea right there; build a site where businesses can post their problems, procedures, workflows, painpoints, etc, and professionals can comment on them, offer suggestions, either using existing solutions (technical or not), or try to make business connections ("we can build that for you").
- Buying a Mac dev box
- Learning Objective C
- Dealing with the whole Apple Developer's Program paper shuffleI've just bought a Mac Mini + Magic Mouse + VGA Adapter + AppleCare for £700. I've got a decent monitor, KVM switch and keyboard already.
I'm going over my K&R book at the moment, running through all of the exercises — especially pointers.
Once I've finishes with K&R my plan is to go through 'Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X' by Hillegass. Aiming for a completion date around the end of March. After that my iPhone development begins as I should have a decent foothold over core Mac programming and will, hopefully, only need to fill in a few blanks using the online references.
In imaginary-land, where I live, of the 7 companies I beat to market, 4 of them had million dollar + exits or acquisitions, so I COULD have been worth 45-55 million, give or take.
My number one challenge in doing anything is not having somebody else to motivate me, or even just tell me what to do. With almost everything I do, I solve the challenges first; the bits that otherwise make the product, or the bits that aren't obviously going to work... once I've built those out, the project is mentally done for me.
I will often fail to do the little things, the EASY things even, like building the change password page, or sending an email for account creation, etc. I'm so bad at it, even, that I will often stop after I have figured out HOW to solve the problems, without ever even bothering to actually implement.
So yeah, that's why I'm stuck with my 9-to-5. Good question.
The overriding complaint he heard from his clients about other contractors was not that their work was bad, or that their prices were high or didn't match what they quoted, but rather it was that they just never showed up!
Simply by making appointments and actually showing up to quote the job or to do the work, he got tons of business.
Funnily enough, I think I'd make a solid startup/side-project coach and it's exactly what I need, also. Would love to see a small group work together to motivate each other, like an online version of the YC dinners (going by what I've read of them on here).
Of course, I wouldn't be fiddling around with new product ideas if I was satisfied with the day job either.
I'd definitely be into the small group idea - it would have to be quite a bit smaller and non-public than HN though :-)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/technology/personaltech/28...
I have some fuzzy ideas on better webmail I plan to experiment with one day.
Looks as though the project is going to be called 'Letters App' and the president is John Gruber.
My musings on interesting areas:
* I don't care about IMAP/POP/all that stuff. Mail comes in via SMTP, goes out via SMTP.
* Messages go straight into postgres
* There's gold in them thar messages headers - there's a lot of structure hidden in there that gets ignored, it must be possible to do something interesting.
* GTD motivated one-message-at-a-time, file/reply/mark to reply later.
* There must be something interesting you can do with automatic email classification.
* Only client is webmail.
* Unashamed focus on people who need to manage 500 messages a day.
1) Receive information through web form or email
2) Print it out
3) Scan it in to document management system.
There are whole offices of people whose job it is to do this.
Actually, that one is a good one.
I'll add my own problem: paperwork. The organization I work for has lots of seemingly useless paperwork, but it cannot be automated because of the legal requirements - we NEED to have paper signatures of customers' contracts.
That said, we're looking into minimizing it as much as possible - if only there was a widely recognized and legally accepted electronic equivalent to the signature, we could automate most of the process :(
I'm looking for a wiki program to run. I want to force people to login before they can read any of the wiki (it's for internal use). It also needs to support LDAP.
Currently, I load up Wikipedia and find their table (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software). I can then take that table and import it directly into a Google Spreadsheet, which lets me do better filtering. Hopefully the table on Wikipedia has the fields for the comparison I want. If not, I have to go and fill out the list myself (and then add it to Wikipedia). I then spend the next few days playing around with the short list until I'm satisfied with my choice; then implement.
Thats all well and good. But I'm not the IT department! Okay, as a startup, I am, but it isn't core to my business. And I feel like it has got to be a solved problem. How about for inventory tracking? A trouble ticket system? Etc.
This shouldn't be that difficult.
Asking people what they use certainly helps, but they may or may not have the same requirements.
As an app, a better way to use tables on Wikipedia would be great (especially when things are split across multiple tables as the list of wiki software is).
(I'm not affiliated, but while writing up my use case, I came across this: http://www.wikimatrix.org )
I need to read it quickly, the project need to be complete within 1 month... or I'LL DIE :'( :'(
However if you look around, there are far better places to go looking to solve problems then HN. The recession is plush with opportunity. Not just opportunity to help someone with some insignificant problem, but to truly help someone live better. Personally, I am doing pretty well but when i go back to the place where I grew up everywhere I look I see unemployment especially in young people in their 20's. I've spent a great deal of thought towards analyzing why this is. I've come to many conclusions, but in the end I think its an education system that prepared a large body of students for work in industry that was lifted up and handed to computers. So now there is at least one town (and I would imagine there are more) where there are young people eager to find a job. I feel like the internet is a great solution, the local economy may be devastated but the global economy probably still has something for them. Sites like etsy are one step towards this direction. I think if you can find something more specialized, with the principle of self employment. you have something special.