What are some valuable problems you know about?
What are some valuable problems you know about?
Hi! I assume most of us have had jobs or done some freelancing. I was wondering do you know about some valuable problems, that you perhaps don't want to pursue yourself, but you know they exist based on your experience?
Some lucrative perennial problems:
Yes, these are all crowded fields, full of companies big and small who are making oodles of money. You could be one of them. 😎
Another thing they have in common is they are all very close to the heart of how your target customers envision themselves increasing their revenue. They're absolute necessities. They're not nice-to-haves, and they're not tangential to generating revenue. This will help put you in a position where you're building something your customers find valuable and important, are enthusiastic to share and talk about, and are willing to pay lots of money for.
Small businesses still have no idea about digital marketing, and the ones who are interested are still vastly over-paying to whichever agency can explain it to them in relatively plain language. And yet the agencies are still addicted to their buzzword-babble, which causes the small businesses to basically either write a blank check or to give up on digital altogether.
Also, analytics and business insight for small businesses, although this is super hard since their data is such a hot mess (and since they've been burned so many times already by "digital charlatans" who don't really understand small biz constraints).
The bigger opportunity is to help every mom & pop small business turn into their own franchise, which allows them to either expand, automate, or exit.
(Source: acted as an advisor to an old school chiropractor for a while, and was fascinated by both 1) how much money they were making and 2) how much money they were losing for a relatively simple and small business.)
SaaS point and click integrations, like what Mulesoft does but much more simplistic. ..... Next, event processing like what keen.io does by much more simplistic. Point and click type onboarding. These can be viewed in Klipfolio.
What Mulesoft like integrations would you want to see?
This type of product can be very simplified as A PaaS. Drag and drop can build API's - https://www.altova.com/mapforce - I could build it and make millions. But I have two projects launching now. No time. If you want I could create a solution architecture design and later a technical architecture design. I have built much bigger and more complex systems than this. Each SaaS would need this: https://swagger.io/blog/api-documentation/what-is-api-documentation-and-why-it-matters/ - https://swagger.io/specification/ Here is the pricing model: https://segment.com/pricing/
What would the MVP look like? Would you have to build feature parity with the Altova product or what subset would be the most useful?
Not really, I just gave you the Altova product images as a visual understanding. You use swagger to consume each set of endpoints. As each SaaS has a exposed API and it might not be everything. Once each exposed set of endpoints is consumed by the MVP, then there is a visual mapper. However, you need to convert this to a "use case" for the user to understand. Such as "transfer sales data", or "consume CRM data sets". Later you have 10-20 use cases. Over time you increase this to 40-50. Look how segment.com does it. Example open source: https://github.com/szeke/Web-Karma - If you can't build the design docs I can do it.
I have a tech background also. I think the tech is usually not my problem. It can usually be figured out. My problem usually is where are the users and how to convert a user to a paying customer for a use case.
Marketing to demand is a whole other challenge. No one does the work for you. If the challenge worries you, don't start anything.
I totally agree if you are not willing to do sales and marketing as an entrepreneur you probably shouldn't start. It will be very difficult.
Looking for the easy path is a loop to never ending failed projects.
A billion plus people want help with the following:
If you can help people to get rich or six-pack abs, you could literally be 100th best and still out-earn almost every single project on IH. Ditto for dating and social apps or even mobile games.
Website migrations service
When I used to purchase, build, and sell profitable websites I would have loved a trustworthy company or person that can guarantee the safe transfer of a website between the two parties.
We usually solved this by hiring a full-stack web dev that has worked with both platforms, such as bluehost -> digitalocean, but even i know that was an overkill and expensive!
Providing true multi lingual support
A headless CMS that you can whitelabel for thousands of users and charge a subscription to access. Most headless CMSs are for publishers and small groups and aren’t meant for the use case of reselling to users as a web app back-end.
This would make setting up a site-builder type startup trivial and would lead to an explosion in that market if done right.
I think there's an interesting product space developing around productivity tricks. I use an extension called blocksite that in a way automates the willpower necessary to stay off of distracting websites while I'm working. As entertainment and social media get more addictive I think apps like this could end up being a compelling product.