Ask HN: Any pain points worth building an MVP for?

This is something I’d love to build but don’t have time. I was talking to a police officer a couple months ago and he was telling me the difficulties they have dealing with people that speak no English during emergency situations (someone’s bleeding out).<p>They have a language service they can use but it’s slow to loop another person in. They end up resorting to Google Translate which is also kinda slow to type in their questions. The voice to text feature is finicky too.<p>What he wants is a website &#x2F; app with a series of pre recorded questions. The answers are simple yes &#x2F; no nods. This could potentially save someone’s life.<p>I honestly think this should be a free website. But if you’re looking to start a business it could be a great way to build credibility in the space.

I have some Nginx access logs. Not many logs. I need to parse those logs and analyse them.<p>Some questions I want to answer from my logs:<p>1. Which API is slow<p>2. Which API is broken, ie. returning 4xx or 5xx<p>3. Which API is called most often<p>I don&#x27;t want to integrate some backend software into my code. At least not at this stage.<p>Hopefully there can be a website for me to upload my logs. After uploading, it would parse my logs and show me some plots. Google doesn&#x27;t introduce me to such services. Maybe there are some.<p>At the end, I spent 2 hours parsing the data with Python and analizing them with R. To save myself 2 hours&#x27; life, I would pay for such a service.<p>I thought of making such a product myself. But I want to implement some other idea first.<p>If you know such kind of service, please let me know :)

Perhaps a product that helps indie hackers discover problems worth solving without the hassle of engaging with the real world?<p>All snark aside, you personally need to experience the problem of you are going to come up with a novel solution people who pay for.

Go visit local businesses. Ask them about what are their pain points. Build for them. Focus on the solution from their POV. You ain’t gonna find shit online.

People have recommended &quot;scratch your own itch&quot; but I find this is often like trying to see your own eyes.<p>Imagine a person, or find a person in your life. Create a &quot;persona&quot; around that person&#x27;s experiences you observe.<p>So far, if that person is you, great. Now you can see yourself just like you were any other object, with properties and methods, etc.<p>Then map out the experiences of that persona, and create other personas and do the same for those. As you map out multiple personas, you will start to see shared experiences they have.<p>As you look through shared experiences you will start to find pain points, and soon you will have pain points that are the same across many personas.<p>Pain point mapping can be as high-level as &quot;does not have viable future&quot; or as low-level as &quot;cannot remember password&quot; so you want something in the middle like &quot;cannot understand how to get traffic&quot; or a mid-low &quot;forgets to buy milk&quot; or &quot;cannot ...&quot;<p>This is what people usually partner with a Growth Hacker for, or have a cofounder with ideas already and needs a technical solution to an idea already prepared.

If you want the indie hacker life, you have to develop the skills that sustain it.<p>People have lots of pain points that irritate them enough to pay for a fix, but the vast majority will not frame it in such a clear way or just announce it to the world.<p>You can take a course like 30x500 (my personal recommendation) that equips you for such a pain discovery and fix definition process. If you&#x27;re willing to be patient about it, you can also, on your own time, develop your listening skills for that sort of complaint.<p>Example: from your question, if I could offer a service that lists points of friction or inefficiency that many people complain about and would pay to improve, <i>you</i> would probably pay me to use it and pick a starter for your project. That&#x27;s a business idea! If I can figure out a reliable, sustainable way to gather this information and then reach out to people in your situation to offer it, I&#x27;m on my way to a viable product.

For B2C:<p>1. Is there a community you&#x27;re already part of? Could be hobby &#x2F; industry related<p>2. Do you have an easy way to reach them (e.g. through a sub-reddit)?<p>3. If people are constantly asking for the same type of information or numbers, is there an opportunity to make a Google Sheets document with useful tabular data? (would only take you a couple of hours)<p>4. If people keep referencing this spreadsheet you&#x27;ve created, you can throw it into MongoDB and now you&#x27;ve got a) something useful and b) traffic.<p>Is this simplistic and prescriptive? Yes, but better than create-react-app and hoping to build something people need.

You’re asking the wrong question to the wrong crowd. We’re all software engineers, if there was something obvious we’d build it ourselves.

I think you&#x27;re approaching this from the wrong direction. If you have the technical skills and some ideas, you can start proving them out and perhaps pursue one. But there are an awful lot of people with just ideas, most of them bad but not all, who need technical help. I would focus on finding someone how has worked on validation to the point where you&#x27;re convinced they&#x27;ve got something, then try to join up. The validation is an important key, because it helps prove they&#x27;re committed and bringing real value to the table. Previously this might have been enough for them to get funding and buy technical expertise, but with changing markets you investing your skills has much more value. If you follow this approach once or a few times you&#x27;ll learn a lot about discovery and validation and then maybe have something you want to pursue completely independently.

Something I&#x27;ve wanted was a way of setting up any computer I touch to have what I want&#x2F;expect it to have so I can start working in a dev environment.<p>I dev on windows, osx, and Ubuntu.<p>So far I&#x27;ve written a go CLI that is able to bootstrap some stuff for a fresh computer, and tell me what I&#x27;m missing.

Fill in the blank on this sentence a few times without thinking too much:<p>“It’s hard for me to _________________.”<p>Then, to make sure you’re not BS’ing yourself ask this follow-up question for each answer:<p>“Have I taken any action to fix this?”<p>If you haven’t, it’s probably a made up problem.<p>If you have, there is the starting point for your MVP idea…

Don’t bother with decentralization. Nobody knows what that is. You will just end up wasting your time defining a term they don’t to hear because they have already settled on unrealistic expectations that have nothing to do with decentralizing anything.<p>I have been thinking about how I could monetize performance. I have learned how to load data heavy pages with complex UIs in 0.3 seconds with full state restoration. I have also found a way to test automate that experience with ease and without a giant test automation framework.<p>Performance is great because the business implications are vast from improved human focus and less fatigue to fewer infrastructure costs and superior user retention.

I&#x27;m kind of also searching for that but I don&#x27;t want to waste efforts in experiments. I want to MVP something that can easily start making money fast.<p>Not totally sure on how to find it yet, but I&#x27;m pretty sure is not just online.

Here&#x27;s a discussion on pain points in the ICU: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33661482" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33661482</a>

Here.<p>Fast C&#x2F;C++ toolchain. Similar speed as tcc but with cpp support. No need to produce super-optimized code, would be nice to have LLVM as an optional backend for release builds.

Scratch your own itch ? :)<p>Can you tell us what you have tried?

Not sure if something like this exists but I&#x27;d love a project management software (web or native) aimed at solo developers that prioritizes speed and keyboard shortcuts.<p>Existing tools cater for teams and organizations, so they come with bells and whistles which I don&#x27;t need. What I&#x27;m looking for is something a tad better than notepad: blazing fast way to create an entry and classify it as feature, bug, research etc, add some tags like frontend, backend, UI, etc and add some notes. Obviously there will be a little more like a great search, a way to quickly switch between projects etc but the focus should be on simplicity and speed of use. Ideally pretty much everything should be doable via keyboard. It&#x27;s ok if it&#x27;s opinionated and has limited functionality. But as long as core task management features are seamless, I&#x27;d be happy.<p>I&#x27;m working on a start-up idea right now and thought the above would be really helpful (own itch). Also low key thinking of building it myself.

My partner did a DNA test through Ancestry.com because she wanted to know her ethnicity. She was the subject of a closed adoption. When she got her results back, she got a list of people who opted-in to sharing DNA match status with others. Her matches were good enough that it was very possible to find her biological parents.<p>There are a lot of techniques to building familial profiles from this list. One is called “Leeds” where you place individuals into groups who they themselves match with. You can then color-code it and get a visual distinction of families. There are other techniques, too: grouping matches by ethnicity, and by ancestor.<p>Obviously, I didn’t want to do this by hand like everyone else. I sought out existing software but the two solutions required me to login to Ancestry (and not via oauth), and run a client on my computer like it’s 1999.<p>No thanks.<p>I wrote some Ruby scripts, it didn’t take long. I joined some Facebook groups which where helpful. I tried to be helpful with what I had learned, so I explained the techniques to others who had posted in the group.<p>I noticed that not everyone does this on a computer with two monitors, like I have. A lot of people don’t even own a computer these days, contrary to what HN would lead me to believe.<p>One person was especially... I don’t want to say inept, but desperate. I offered to run my code against their matches after they added my account as a collaborator to their test, allowing me to see their matches without needing to give me their login. I did, they said thank you.<p>The next day I woke up with 42 messages in my Facebook inbox asking if I could do theirs.<p>I spent the weekend putting together a shitty website that automated this and sent the link. Everyone was very grateful. I listened to them and built it out a little more. Some seasoned “search angels” (people with a knack for this kind of sleuthing) asked me to build out some other reports. I created them, and asked these people to record some of their workflows so I could see how I could improve their manual processes. A Chrome extension was born to inject some code into Ancestry for better UX.<p>Little did I know that when I took a DNA test I would learn that my dad isn’t my father. My mom passed away three years ago, and despite us being best friends, she never told me this fact. I have since learned that she mentioned this fact to others, but never disclosed a name (and nobody ever pressed).<p>I myself am on this wild goose chase now, and my new search angel friends are on it with me, though for the last few months we have been collectively stumped and brickwalled.<p>What I’m trying to say is that there are problems all around us. We just need to listen for them, and question why things are done the way they are done. If there’s any sort of wiggle room, or gray area as to why, it might be a problem worth solving. It might not be a sexy technical problem worthy of the front page of HN; it might not even have enough bros in the community to boost you on ProductHunt. The case for using a new hot trendy stack might be lost. It might not even be all that profitable.<p>But if you adjust your expectations, and find something that genuinely interests you instead of someone else, you should get enough satisfaction to make it worthwhile.<p>My matches, in case anyone is curious: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sherlockdna.com&#x2F;ancestry&#x2F;leeds_reports&#x2F;99a62d1cb68b7a10b3f0fac1dc97aece&#x2F;share" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sherlockdna.com&#x2F;ancestry&#x2F;leeds_reports&#x2F;99a62d1cb68b7...</a> (sorry mobile users, I haven’t quite figured out the UI here)