Ask HN: A bite-sized problem in your company that I could turn into a tiny SaaS?
As a technical person I often come up with interesting problems to solve that are way too ambitious for the time that I have to dedicate to the problem.
At the same time I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that I'm not aware of and don't have a way of finding out about them on my own.
As a challenge to myself I am wanting to create something useful for others in a reasonable time period and make a non-zero amount of income from it just to get myself excited. If I could make my monthly coffee money from this I would consider it a success.
So I'm asking about your simple problems and pain points that are not common, generic or popular enough for big companies to solve (like customer support, or email marketing) but common enough that a solution could be useful to more than just you.
For example this could be a cursed shared spreadsheet that could be turned into a basic CRUD SaaS if the same product could be useful to a small but reasonable number of other people/organisations too.
Or perhaps it could be something specific to your business domain and location.
So what pain points are you having that I could solve?
Looking forward to a discussion here :)
4 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 16.5 ms ] threadI think for companies with their own dev, they would either put some resource to resolve the problem, or live with it because they can't resolve it(be it politics, sensitive data, legacy architecture, lack of resource, etc).
What about a web service for people to advertise their pain point with requirement, and put a bounty for solution?
These have been tried before. The problem for many people lies in adequately describing a problem in non-specialist terms so developers without in-depth industry expertise will be able to grasp it.
Moreover, domain specialists often even don't recognise problems anymore because "It's always been done this way.". People have a habit of not seeing the forest for the trees when having worked long enough in a certain way. That's why getting outside advice and a beginner's mindset are such effective tools.
Lastly, non-technical people often can't estimate how much effort a solution might involve. So, an appropriate price for a solution might be higher than the cost of the pain involved.
In any case, such a service would involve a lot of to and fro between the parties, which probably is too much of a hassle for tiny, bite-sized problems.