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Ask HN: Is there anybody collecting pain?

20 points by jorgeleo ↗ HN
Reading HN I get clear that it is all about identifying and solving a common, and profitable, customer pain. Is there any website that serves as a communication chanell between potential customers and their common pains, and start ups that are working on the field? How do you get in touch with potential customer's pains?

23 comments

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jeffool
You mean a single place where customers can complain about issues, and vote on what they hate most? Intentionally ask people what they hate, instead of asking what they want?

... I like the way you think. I very you could get more actually useful information that way. You get what problems you need to be solved, rather than what people THINK they want.

jib
uservoice does this well
jorgeleo
I like this idea, but I need a better way to separate personal frustrations and rants, from real problems.
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encima
Is this not what getsatisfaction.com tries to achieve?
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lifeisstillgood
Yes, there are offline meetings of this group at every bar closest to the office, Thursdays and Fridays.

Real pain can be found there Tuesday evenings

sadly none of the participants are likely to collate their pain on a website for you unless doing so directly helps.

lifeisstillgood
Then again if desperate for ideas it probably would not hurt to visit that bar and ask.

IRS is unlikely to accept the bar tab as legitimate business expenses.

But then again the comment on Reading a companies complaints list is interesting - find the customer service mnager at big Corp and ask them ?

Hmm, might actually try that :-)

eli
There's no blanket IRS rule against deducting a bar tab if it is indeed a "reasonable" business expense.
jorgeleo
This whole track points to a different thing, how sociable (or not) are we the developers, thanks for the comments.

The problem with the IRS is that "they" hold the definition of "reasonable", for a bar, tab? I rather swallow the cost.

patio11
How do you get in touch with potential customer's pains?

Talk to anyone. Preferably, the kind of person who a) has money and b) wouldn't think something like "Hmm, something sucks in life, I think I'll go announce this fact on a social news service in the hopes that someone will solve it for $9 a month."

It really is that easy.

Here's something which will work for anything you care to learn about: "Hiya. I'm interested in your industry. Would you let me buy you lunch so I can ask you about your experiences in it?" Best $25~40 you'll ever spend.

ActVen
This is fantastic advice. I have had lunches like this numerous times. They have been overall a very successful strategy. Sure, you will have a very small percentage that don't really provide insight...but that is well worth the cost. It is often important to preface the invitation with an assurance that you aren't going to try and sell them anything.
TamDenholm
I've always wanted be live my life as a dilettante mainly for two reasons. 1) I'm genuinely interested in learning things that i find interesting as an outsider and would love to be taught my someone passionate in the area. 2) It would provide fantastic insight into their daily problems that usually could be easily optimised by someone with a programmer state of mind, perhaps spawning a business opportunity.

So yeah, perhaps run with that? Its one of the things i'll hopefully be doing in the next year.

[dead] johnconroy
(Jorge fyi "chanell" is a typo) my $0.02: I think it's hard to really understand a pain point without having been frustrated by it personally. Hence I think real world experience should be your guide... i.e. what annoys YOU, what pain-point do YOU understand?
colinwinter
The pain with finding user pains is organizing. Everybody will talk/search things differently. Pains can also be slightly different but on the same topic. Then theres the marketing problem, finding enough users in a certain topic/pain to justify the pain. Consider how biased the content on quora is (relative to availability of content, not the content quality itself).
arkitaip
This is difficult because when you're looking in from the outside you can't see the pain and problems due to all the complexity and context blindness.

The easiest way is to look to your own field or industry. This is somewhat difficult if you're a programmer but there are tons of opportunities even for us - just take a look at Light Table over at Kickstarter [1] for a recent example or the multitude of software development tools, libraries, addons and frameworks that put food on the tables of many developers [2].

But what if you don't have a field?

In that case you can deep emerge yourself in one. Pick an industry/sector where there is money and volume, lots of resource slack, where society's Big Huge Problems are solved, etc.

How to feel the pain? Start by reading periodicals and other publications. These tend to constantly write about current problems and future challenges/opportunities in a plain and easy to understand language.

Nothing beats going straight to the source so you might want to get in touch with practitioners and associations and pick their brains, follow them around at work, etc. It's important to reflect on the things you see, put them in a larger context, ask yourself how parts of a business could be improved (for a lightweight aid, use the business model canvas [3]).

Asking professionals what their problems are, however, is a problematic approach because practitioners often don't know what they know, what they don't know or the root cause of problems [4] [5]. Casual conversations can still give you valuable information and guidance. At the very least it contributes to giving you a better understanding of the context you're emerging yourself in.

Research papers can be useful because they are often problem-solution oriented, and even dedicate a section to Future Work. The research data can also be useful to build a convincing argumentation for any future solutions. The most exiting ideas tend to grow at the boundaries between different disciplines and where science meets art/entertainment, so any opportunity where you get to see your industry in a new or alien light should be cherished.

Colleges and other educational institutions tend to be the place where practice and theory collide, resulting in all kinds of wonderful ideas. Often these educational institutions have good relationships with commercial and industrial life and can tell you the pains of the industry.

Basically the more effort you invest in emerging yourself in a industry or specific sector and the closer you are to the knowledge, the greater your chances are to find the systemic problems on which you can build multi billion dollar businesses.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Model_Canvas

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_open_source_applicat...

[3] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality

jorgeleo
Thanks for the comment, this has been very illuminating, several ideas popup from here