[chowes]

> Call around, talk to your network. I don’t just mean those ~300 people you’ve never met on LinkedIn, but your actual family, Facebook friends, etc. ... Figure out what the problems that they’re having are. Solve exactly the problems they express

This is, imo, the biggest hurdle for engineers who want to become entrepreneurs. I've seen so many HN posts about people trying to crowd source startup problems, trying to automate away this piece and just get down to coding. I too struggled with this for the longest time. I felt like a solution looking for a problem. Just give me a problem, any problem, and I'll build the best damn app and be on my way!

But that's not how it works. If you want to stop being an engineer, you need to stop acting like one. Engineers have their problems roughly scoped and entered in a JIRA board. Entrepreneurs have to go find problems to solve. You want to go be an entrepreneur? Go learn to talk to people. Go learn to listen to others, empathize, and to convince people to believe in you. You will be a company of one - so go build out your personal sales & marketing departments.

[brtkdotse]

A key thing most developers wanting the become entrepreneurs miss (I certainly did) is that more often then not coding something is the slowest and/or most expensive way to solve someone’s problem. Many, many business ideas could probably just be a Wordpress site with a small plugin which you can farm off to Upwork for a pittance that doesn’t make for a very good “Show HN”.

[cercatrova]

But that's not fun to build. And I suspect this is where the dichotomy comes in. Engineers want to have something that's fun to build while also making money, which can be the problem.

[coffee]

As an engineer, what is fun about it? From your statement it would be "something fun to build." I wonder why building a business and building a piece of software are so different, and why one is fun while the other is not.

[cercatrova]

Fun about what exactly? If you mean farming to Upwork, not building is not fun for engineers. Building a business can be, but again, only if the product itself is fun to build. Who wants to work in a business where the core product is boring? I mean boring as in the fundamental product, not the industries, such as healthcare, construction, and so on, basically all but consumer tech.

[coffee]

> Fun about what exactly? If you mean farming to Upwork, not building is not fun for engineers.

Nope. Never said anything about "not building." Only you have stated that.

This circles back to my original question/statement; "I wonder why building a business and building a piece of software are so different"

> Building a business can be [fun]

Absolutely! Remove the words "a business" and restate that as:

"Building can be [fun]"

Now you can insert almost anything...

"Building a bike can be fun" "Building a business can be fun" "Building a product can be fun" "Building software can be fun" "Building a computer can be fun" ... ... ...

> Who wants to work in a business where the core product is boring

Remove the words "wants to" in that sentence and you could apply that statement to most of the Software Engineers who work for others. SE's typically work around this limitation by justifying it with the technology they are working on instead.

"I'm learning React!" "I get to use Ruby on Rails everyday!" "I get to learn more about using all the AWS services!" ... ... ...

None of that matters.

The only thing that matters is "building." Building is fun!

Why can't building a business be just as fun as building software? ...and we're right back to my original question :-)

[cercatrova]

Because business is mostly about sales and marketing and not so much about the product. Exceptions occur, of course, but generally a better marketed product is more successful than a better built product.

Engineers don't like sales and marketing generally. That's why they're engineers. And unlike as you state, building in general is not necessarily fun, only specific things being built are fun, those that align with the interests of the builder. If you told me to build a house, I wouldn't necessarily consider that fun, so your initial premise is flawed. A business in this case also falls into the "not fun" category, again, in general to engineers.

[stets]

I believe this is very common with web devs as well who argue all day over wordpress vs static site vs whatever. What works best? Usually the solution that is quick and web dev for small brochure sites is more a marketing skill than a technical one.

[soulnothing]

Honest question, is this worth it? I've noticed the same thing. Most requirements are simple, and can be done via upwork freelancer etc. What you can provide is extra customer service or maintenance. But that seems like a race to the bottom.

Whenever I come across these, it's in the territory of not worth my free time. But for the more complex projects they want a whole team, and I've found it's difficult as a solo person to sale that.

[bigmit37]

Yes! This is something I have noticed as well and it’s requiring a little rewiring of my brain.

[soulnothing]

I spent a lot of time going to angel rounds, vc meetups. Talking to a lot of people about their issues, what they needed. It was a great way to get exposed to a myriad of problems. Angel.co is also a good one for finding places where some one has an idea, but needs tech help.

The problem I had. Is that a majority of what I came across was mobile and web orientated. As a back-end dev, it's not something I can help with. Especially when for the pitch deck metrics/numbers and a pretty demo are the big selling points.

[elliotbnvl]

This is a great, great point. I struggled with this feeling for a while too. It's amazingly frustrating.