[throwaway2016a]

I may be reading between the lines too much and I apologize if I am...

But every few months (weeks?) I see a post by a founder-type essentially trying to mine the Hacker News collective brains for startup ideas. It doesn't work that way. The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced.

The idea of a savior who comes in and solving the major problems of an industry they have never worked in is not a myth but close to one. (Elon Musk being a notable exception with cars and space flight... but he has the capital to attract domain experts to fill in the gaps)

I'd point out the problems in my industry except I am actively working to solve them :)

With that said. Don't let a "know-it-all" on HN (myself included) tell you what to do. If you want to tackle a hard problem in an industry you don't have experience in, please do. You might be the next Elon Musk, I don't know you so I don't know.

If that wasn't your goal with this question... again I apologize.

[notalaser]

> The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced.

Aww, yisss. Case in point, EDA and, in particular, hardware description languages and tools. Every discussion I've had with someone trying to get into this has been so cringe-worthy that I'm actively avoiding now. Every self-professed hardware hacker thinks they have the solution that's going to end all this painful Verilog kerfuffle and yet they're so, so far from getting it.

Like the folks who thing the biggest problem with Verilog and VHDL is that they're so alien that it's hard to get software developers productive with them. Lack of electronics knowledge is what prevents most software developers from being productive in Verilog. A "better" language won't help. Paying attention in their Electronics or Systems classes is going to be ten times more helpful than a Scala/Haskell/whatever-is-fashionable hardware description language.

Or the people who think that development tools are what's holding FPGAs back and that FPGAs would be everywhere, were it not for how hard it is to program them. Trying to explain them that FPGAs are pretty slow gets impossibly difficult as soon as the words "Intel" and "softcore" are mentioned.

Not that there aren't a lot of things to improve in FPGA development tools, or in hardware description languages (which is why you see so much work being done on increasingly higher-level synthesis tools). But unless the number of millions of dollars you're willing to invest is not at least half the number of years you've been studying high-speed IC design, chances are you're as far removed from having a serious answer to all these problems as you are removed from being a modest person.

/rant

[throwaway2016a]

Lol. Funny you should say that.

My wife was an Electrical Engineering major and when I started dating her I saw the Verilog and actually tried to improve it. Although my approach was more a better IDE and emulator than reinventing the language.

I didn't get far. The domain knowledge of electronics needed was too much for me to deal with and still do my own coursework.

[gluggymug]

>Lack of electronics knowledge is what prevents most software developers from being productive in Verilog. A "better" language won't help.

I am working in the FPGA industry. I definitely agree with you.

But possibly I am a little too close to the current industry and way we do things. There's new applications around the corner that need innovative ideas. The innocent fresh perspective could be the seed for something. I am sure if any real decent improvements were started by a SW person, the big companies like Intel would be eating it up.

It funny how people on HN were raving about Altera & Intel recently because word on the FPGA street was that Intel weren't happy with the acquisition. Xilinx has had 14nm FPGAs for a long time while Altera's are nowhere to be seen still. Everyone's expectations of a Xeon with Altera FPGA on the same die are years away I am betting.

[planteen]

Agreed. I have worked with FPGAs at multiple companies, both on the logic side and on the software side interfacing with them. Verilog and VHDL are not the problem. The problems I have seen, over and over are:

1. Improper clock domain crossing

2. Improper timing constraints

I have never used ASIC quality verification tools. But to me a free tool from Xilinx/Altera like valgrind or clang sanitizer would be huge for FPGAs.

Or even just a way to "diff" two bitstreams, one that is "bad" and one that is "good" that were from the same source to see what makes the bad FPGA bad would be huge. I mean bad in the sense that some probabilistic/annealing algorithm used during FPGA synthesis on a net with an incorrect timing constraint lead to a FPGA that doesn't work as intended.

I went from logic to doing software. Can't say I miss the FPGA world. Seems so much easier to get software right.

[pjc50]

Heh :) I've been in an EDA startup, done FPGA work, and I even have a tiny corner of silicon on a shipping IC. I have a draft for a "better verilog" sitting in a text file. Verilog and VHDL are stuck in the FORTRAN77 era.

I've no intention of taking it further than that, because the industry is extremely conservative and there's no money in programming languages.

(I agree that the FPGA-silver-bullet people are annoying. And that people need to realise that FPGA is not programming. But perhaps the tools could help a bit more with that.)

[Artlav]

Interesting, i thought the problem was the other way around.

I find Verilog quite intuitive as is, but the tools are rather crude. I.e. until recently Altera's Quartus felt like a hack some students put together in their spare time - missing basic IDE features, interface bugs that get in the way, poor programmer support on Linux and so on.

[fright]

The idea of solving any problems for an industry that you haven't worked in for at least a couple of years is ludicrous. I'm sure there have been examples of this happening a few times, but it's almost always the exception rather than the rule.

This is especially true when it comes to high level problems in most industries. In most cases there are a few hundred or more smaller issues that add up to create the bigger high level problems, and those issues are almost never even considered when the startups try to disrupt the industry.

Every industry, no matter how small is going to have issues the derive from third parties and outside players that can't be solved by a twist of the business model.

There are a lot of old timers using very old dos era applications in their day to day business, and if you really spend time with them and learn their business you'll learn there is almost always a very valid reason that they haven't switched the latest greatest web-app software that startup founders tend to think can solve all of their problems.

The moral of the story is, founders need to stop trying to swoop in and disrupt industries where they don't even have a clue of the real pain points, and their SaaS solution would just be a new coat of paint on on old issue that isn't solved.

[Mendenhall]

I almost asked a question like this last week with no interest in a startup. I find because of the level of expertise on HN that a topic of this sort helps round out my overall knowledge of what is going on in some of these industries etc. I am not even a programmer but I find very useful actionable information in such threads. Just my 2 cents.

[throwaway2016a]

Academically I enjoy these posts too.

This was intended as (unsolicited, granted) advice to the person asking the questions to examine their goals. If they know they are fighting an up hill battle going in, hopefully they will be better prepared for the fight they are in for. Doing a startup is difficult even when you are a domain expert.

If the interest was purely academic... carry on :)

[hackerews]

I enjoy these posts as well. Love to learn about other industries.

[Cshelton]

Some what off point, but Elon Musk, in his biography, said Space and renewable energy have been things he has concentrated on very early on, before even selling PayPal. They in a way, are his problems, along with everyone else on this Earth.

[throwaway2016a]

Actually I think that is very on-point for my post... perhaps that was why he was successful with it because he has a passion for it. Or perhaps because, to paraphrase you, the "industry" here is human kind and in that respect he has spent his whole life thinking of the challenges of that industry.

Also, as I said in a comment the other day on a different post [1] I do think that under the right circumstances not being an "insider" in an industry is an asset not a negative.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14146850

[codingdave]

It doesn't have to be a hard problem that you solve. Sometimes solving easy, but tedious, problems is a worthwhile goal, too. Really, most industry pains are solved with CRUD apps attached to some workflow. So you might be right that the "best startups" come from your own pains... but some completely adequate lifestyle companies come from just asking around and solving small problems. And there is nothing wrong with that.

[throwaway2016a]

Nothing wrong with that.

I find that for those problems sometimes you don't even need to write a single line of code. Changing the process or the way people think about the problem can be sufficient.

Although I imagine if you drew a venn diagram with easy & important & unsolved then the intersection will be relatively tiny. And from a business defensibility standpoint the barrier of entry may be too low.

[amelius]

> The best startups are ones that have solved a pain point you yourself have experience.

Yet there is zero money in writing development tools :(

[personjerry]

Have you heard of companies like Atlassian and Gitlab?

[nostrademons]

Jetbrains, Rational, Perforce, MySQL, GitHub, Trello, StackOverflow, Joyent, Powershell, etc as well.

The tricky part is that to monetize, you either need to master enterprise sales (which means that the product will take on some PHB-pleasing features that developers despise so they can get through procurement departments), or you need to be acquired by a big company looking to round out their developer tools offerings.

[amelius]

Those companies are running platforms. Not really a fair comparison.

Besides, I'm not literally saying there is no money in development tools. I'm saying that it's a difficult market.

[AznHisoka]

almost everything is a difficult market these days. at least with developers, you know where they hang out. try marketing a SaaS to farmers or construction companies online.

[Chris2048]

Is GitLab well funded?

[scrollaway]

There's money in saving other people money. And in this industry, time is very, very valuable; thus there is money in saving other people time.

If you write development tools that save other people time, there is plenty of money in that.

[booleandilemma]

Visual Studio Professional 2017 is $499.

[jetti]

Embarcadero would disagree with you.

[kelvin0]

I'm not quite sure what your point is. Is it that the OP seems too 'sneaky' for your taste and you'd prefer them coming right out and asking startup ideas/problems to work on?

In any case, what's wrong with trying to probe your peers for ideas and possible brainstorm? If you don't want to participate, simply do not comment, no?

I am a genuinely curious individual, and these are the questions I also like to ask, and not always because I want to profit immediately from them.

I'd be curious to get more of your feedback regarding this.

[jaredklewis]

I don't think anyone is against the OP asking for startup ideas and then profiting from one of them. HN, in my experience, is a very capitalistic place where members find the idea of profiting with software to be quite exciting.

I interpreted it more as a warning that these discussions are not a good way to get startup ideas. Startups need domain experts to understand what the market will pay for, making connections, and so on.

Say somone in the pharmaceutical industry posts about their problems ordering medicines. It's a fine problem, but the point is that the OP is not in a good position to solve it, as he or she is likely lacking industry experience and contacts.

The ideas you come up with yourself are more likely to be the ones you do have the experience and connections to work on.

[Mz]

I felt his point was along the lines of "If a startup is like a marriage, then posting a question like this is kind of like trying to hookup at a bar. It might be fun, but the odds are poor that it will lead to a serious, committed endeavor."

[_pmf_]

> The idea of a savior who comes in and solving the major problems of an industry they have never worked in is not a myth but close to one.

I think Bezos would be a much better example than Musk. Musk is in the process of nudging the car industry a bit (or so SV tends to want to make the rest of the world believe); Bezos basically obliterated small-scale retail as we knew it.

[throwaway2016a]

Thank you for the example. I do not know Bazos' background so I couldn't comment on if he had prior retail and logistics experience.

[arethuza]

I'm not sure what harm it does though - answers like the one from chollida1 are interesting regardless of whether they could become a startup or not.

[throwaway2016a]

I also find the answers interesting and like reading them.

But it does a lot of harm to the person asking the question if they make a life changing decision based on it without being prepared going in.

I just wanted to offer some advice to the person asking the question so if that was their goal and that is what their intentions are then they can go in perhaps a little bit more prepared.

[RivieraKid]

I don't fully agree with this argument. Yes, an advantage of focusing on problems that matter you is that you understand them the best and that it's probably more fun.

But on average, it'll be something that a bunch of other people tried or are trying to solve, so there will be more competition. A typical example is that most start-ups seem to focus on the end consumer despite the fact (well, assumption) that there's more opportunity in focusing on problems that companies have.

I think there's a lot of value of tackling non-IT problems with SV/startup/tech way of thinking. SpaceX might be an example of that - iterative development, openness, company culture, etc.

[theprop]

Yes, very true. In case you've started a company and you're fumbling, think about the problems you've encountered in starting a company. Some of the major issues I faced which seemed to me should not be problems ended up being huge companies e.g. several years ago why we had to have our own email server to send confirmation emails (there were no email apis and it's non-trivial to set up an email server) or why it was a pain/unreliable to get a taxi. It's even mystifying why it's so expensive just to start a company...if you start with some kind of reasonable investment, legal fees are between $7500 to $25k.

[pascalxus]

You've got to understand, entrepreneurs are desparate for hard problems that are legally solvable. There's a vast oversupply of talent with initiative, relative to the number of problems. I don't blame him for trying to find hard problems to solve.

I think, what you are trying to say is that it takes a great deal of domain expertise to fully appreciate and understand those problems. But, you've got to start somewhere. We don't need millions of entrepreneurs trying to build even more meaningless social/gaming apps.

He might need to work in that industry to get enough knowledge to learn about the problem, but, you gotta start somewhere.

[tropo]

This time around I found myself wondering if it might be automated, like "Who is hiring?" and "Who wants to be hired?".

The title needs to say something like "April 2017" or "May 2017" though.

[bigtimeidiot]

>It doesn't work that way. The best startups are ones that solve a pain point you yourself have experienced.

This is a natural extension of "startup founder" becoming a an aspirational occupation for kids fresh out of college. Who needs real-world experience? Disrupt!

Technology is a tool to to aid your expertise.

[return0]

There's nothing wrong with fishing for problems. You can learn more about the problem at hand later.