[sonnyblarney]

">The best way to do this is by asking good questions, and then listening carefully and taking notes

Again I strongly disagree here. This pattern pushes entrepreneurs to create a version++ of something"

... --> not if you are actually listening!

Listening is not about 'let them tell us what feature they want' ... it's 'problem discovery'.

This is maybe the most valuable thing because young devs with 0 exposure to how operations actually work within a company will have their eyes opened wide.

This is where you can hone in on both real and perceived pain points, and develop the lingo that will work in messaging as you go to sell the 'learned' product you make ...

[tilt_error]

It all comes down to domain knowledge, I believe, where it is hard to provide good solutions without actually knowing anything about the type of problems being under scrutiny.

There are other types of generic problems, e.g. word processing, but those domains are often overpopulated with solutions where it is either hard to compete or hard to earn money.

The point you are making is that it is worthwhile to invest in understanding a problem domain well and the more specific it is, the more you have it for yourself :)

[sonnyblarney]

It's not just the problem domain though - there are issues that are very specific in the 'real world' that are not apparent to those even who understand the problem domain well, especially if it's a true B2B style product. Second, is understanding the mindset and uses cases of buyers. Tech people tend to way over-estimate the sophistication of users, and also underestimate how hard it often it is to do basic things.

I once worked for a huge high tech company in Product Marketing, we wanted to run this simple program to reach out to some users. Our problem? We had to host a few images and bits of content and we literally had nowhere to host them. Seriously. Just a few images. We had no production capability for that ... even working with the marketing ops teams ... they have complicated tools and content management systems unsuited to 'just hosting a file'.

We reached out to our customers (carriers like AT&T) so that maybe they could host. Same problem! We're talking business unites of major high tech corporations here unable to just host a file.

Want to use S3? Or whatever? Enter 'legal'. Make a request to the legal department, maybe get a response in a month. Maybe.

It was eerie and funny and sad ... but it was a real eye opener.

[neolefty]

Wow, no wonder Box is doing well — that's a main problem they solve. I didn't really understand its value without hearing your predicament.