[bluehatbrit]

People have problems, go and meet people. Pick an industry you think you might be interested in exploring and then start attending their meetups and events. Speak to people, ask them what their problems are.

A great place to start is finding industries where most people you meet describe themselves as "not technical" or "bad with technology", they're often massively underserved. You'll know you've hit gold when you speak to multiple people across several businesses who all use some behemouth spreadsheet to run one of their core business processes.

[bombcar]

This is huge - get away from the tech industry and you'll find various amounts of problems to be solved, and if you can generalize it enough, you can get something successful.

Here's one I thought of and haven't found a solution for yet - a cheap "vendor portal" where vendors can submit invoices. Everything that exists apparently is enterprise and tens of thousands of dollars; which is out of reach of individuals and small businesses.

[pdimitar]

What do you mean by "vendors submit invoices", exactly? Not sure I see the value.

[gonzo41]

Whilst this is great advice, If you got access to one of those mega spreasheets and worked out the business logic you'd be confronted with a few things. 1. Most business run pretty much the same. 2. Most home grown processes captured in spreadsheets are terrible. 3. Most people don't want to change anything about how they are doing things.

Point 1 makes things easy, 2 and 3 are harder because you have to create and incentive to onboard people onto your product that doesn't exist yet. So actually there's a point 4. You have to do a market scan, and either become an integration expert at some extendable technology or build something new. And then you're developing goes from developing to selling. And then to support.

It's hard to beat excel.

[bluehatbrit]

I agree, the process of building a new product and a successful business is really hard. Especially if you're dislodging existing processes in some way. Extensions and other little bits of process automation can be a nice way to help offer clear advantages over those spreadsheets. None of that is foolproof though, and it's still not easy. That said, it can still be a good signal that there's something in the business which could be turned into a useful product or service.