Ask HN: What are good ways to find startup problems to solve?

Though at some point, it become harder to convince someone else to help with your cause.This happens to me most of the times, I become too immersed in the problem as the problem keeps expanding bringing more problems along the way.

I had to master all aspects of the web development, from dev ops, backend to frontend so I wont be disappointed by spending hours convincing a frontend guy to contribute to a very complex backend( mind that it is not complicated ) where the guy lacks the back story on the original problem I had.

What you want for a startup is fertile ground.

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Go to the nearest upper-middle-class person you know (at the 10th percentile of revenues). Ask for their account statement. For each line, try to answer the following:

1) What are the margins? Is the price of the item driven by costs of production, or by what people accepted to pay? You want the latter. Prefer emotional over utility.

2) How did the person came to know the product? What were the drivers of acquiring the product? What did close the sale? What were the alternatives?

3) What is the cost of entering this market? Would you be able to do it?

- Then you have a list of fertile grounds, out of which you can try to work out:

4) What can be improved over this market? How would you sell differently?

5) What can be improved over this product? What would you modify in the product?

6) Are they buying it? Build only the store front: throw a landing page somewhere, stir some activity, see if you get emails. Interview the leads you got. It's ok to announce to people you won't be doing X.

7) And then, only then, you can work on a problem to exploit the scarcity of being the only one having solved it.

1. Pick an industry that you are either interested in and/or you believe is going to be more profitable - i.e. financial services pay more than retail therefore more potential.

2. Take a friend from University who works in that industry and not in technology to dinner, beer, coffee and find out what aspects of their job they find are the biggest PITA.

3. Read up what the management consultants are talking about. Not they should be considered gospel on problem or solution but if they are trying to sell something they believe there is a) problem that exists in that industry, b) there is a market for a solution and c) the industry is buying that solution.

4. Read up what your potential competitors are doing about the problem

5. Go to your thinking space (mines the movies) and noodle.

6. Compare your idea to the knowledge you've acquired in 2,3 and 4.

You can bail out at any point, you can do 1 through 4 in any order but do them before 5 and 6. You can be running multiple problems in parallel and you'll probably end up with ideas that coalesce. Then when you've got to step 6 make a decision about whether you're still interested in the problem, because now comes the hard work.

I spoke with a couple of friends with the same problem and they were really interested so I integrated all the scripts in a program with a easy to use gui...

The 2 friends never used the program... the website I created got almost no visits from organic search.

It solves a problem that is related to schools but you have to use the software since the start of the school year to be of help so I'm in the process to cold-email some people about the software...

Unfortunately there are no places where the potential users hang...

After all the time spent reading about mvp, startups, releases, growth hacking, I'm proud I could complete the software and release it... also if nobody will never use it.

I had a pain and solved it but it is not enough when it is impossible to reach the audience of possible users...