Item — HN Reader

Fully agree with what you said. The challenge is finding businesses that struggle so hard, and have an urgent need, such that they are willing to pay for a product with rough edges built by a rando dude. And for there to be enough revenue potential to sustain myself (I live in the UK).

Continuing on the example - a flower shop probably manages their inventory via spreadsheets. They're not happy with it, but I doubt they'll fork out $600/year for an inventory tracking app. And I think it'll be very hard for me to get in touch with flower shop owners to validate the idea - they live in a very different world to mine. So the only path to success is to publish an app on the Apple App Store and hope it takes off.

That's similar to what I ended up doing with the last startup project I had, unfortunately it didn't work out.

1 comments

You said you worked sales right? In order to validate your idea you need to write a list of every flower shop in town and visit in person. 90% will be too busy but the remaining will drop priceless info.

Sounds like your main problem is not going after a specific problem that people have expressed, not that you think would work.

I've tried that. I had an idea for a process checklist for GitHub Actions pipelines. Came up with it after seeing people complain online, also had the issue myself. I reached out to everyone I could find who complained about it. The 30% who replied said that they wouldn't be interested in trying out a solution.

I've come to realize that just because people express problems, doesn't mean they'll do something about it. You need to find something where the pain is urgent, and unsurmountable. And that's very tricky.

>> You need to find something where the pain is urgent, and unsurmountable. And that's very tricky.

As you noted earlier, the tech is the easy part. As you note here, finding customers is the hard part.

Naturally doing the easy part first can often turn out yo be a waste of time.

You talked above about "your ideas". Don't start there. Start by walking around talking to people. Start in your local community. You're looking for pain, and a willingness to pay. Yes, it's the hard part. Yes it's work.

You need to find hair on fire problems. The classic vitamin vs. pain killer. You need to be a pain killer.

I highly recommend the book "The Mom Test" for tips on how to speak to customers and what kind of information you can get.

Just a few of the things I learnt from that book:

Don't ask if people would use your product. It's too hypothetical and people are too nice. "Sure, I'd probably use it. Looks useful. Keep working on it!". Then you never hear from them again. If you really think they'd be interested, ask for money.

Don't ask about people's problems in an abstract way. "Tell me about your business problems" is just too vague and wishy-washy. Ask about more specific things. Example: "You're having issues with double booking? Tell me about the last time it happened." Asking about the most recent time something happened is a great way to get concrete details.

Ask people how they have solved the problems or tried to solve the problem they talk about. "It was a major issue so we hired an extra member of staff to confirm all the stock lists". (Great, they're willing to spend real money on fixing this). "I searched around and tried out ABCSoft and XYZSoft but they were designed for a different kind of business and didn't really solve it for us" (pretty good, they're putting effort into finding solutions). "Oh, well, it's always been a big issue but we haven't tried to solve it yet" (Uh-oh, it's probably not really a big problem for them. It's not painful enough for them to try to solve).