[patio11]

What are some "business problems" that I could solve with RoR?

Consider a real estate agent. Real estate agents spend most of their time prospecting for leads. Leads convert at X% into sales, where the agent earns 6% of the transaction price. Any system you can deliver for a real estate agent which increases the number of leads they have or the percent which eventually turn into sales solves a problem for them.

Consider an insurance company. Insurance companies have prospects and successfully sell some percentage of them policies, which transfer risks from the insured to them. The insured occasionally suffer losses, which results in them filing a claim against the insurance company, which the company will investigate and probably pay. Between the time an insurance company collects payments and pays claims, it has use of the "float" created by money which is probabalistically owed to someone but not paid yet on its books, and it can invest this float profitably. Software can increase the number of prospects they have and/or the percentage of prospects who are successfully convinced to buy policies. Software can assist (or replace) very expensive human underwriters, who judge whether a particular client is worth taking on and, if so, at what price. Software can greatly improve underwriting profits. Software can streamline the costs involved in processing claims. Software can be used to assist companies in paying out less claims that are actually outside of their policy requirements but which had previously been paid due to error or the infeasibility of adjusting them profitably. Software can increase the profits of management of float.

Consider a SaaS company. Ignore the product. There's four numbers of interest in that company: visitors per month, new trials per month, average plan price, and churn rate. Software can move those numbers up, up, up, and down, respectively.

Working in any industry will tend to expose you to a lot of these opportunities. After you have the mindset, the question is more-or-less as simple as asking an accountant "How would you look at a company and find where money is being spent?" I mean, if he were pressed for time, he might say "By looking", though there's a longer way to phrase that.

[summerlunch]

Okay, your accountant example has made it clear that there is really no obvious way of finding business problems by just merely looking from the outside. Now I guess I should figure out how to expose myself to an industry.

What is your opinion on the effectiveness of speaking to people and asking them directly about their problems? Or am I better off reading industry magazines/blogs/forums and kind of examining them in their natural habitat?

[patio11]

Okay, your accountant example has made it clear that there is really no obvious way of finding business problems by just merely looking from the outside.

I don't think that was the takeaway I was going for. An accountant, told "Tell me where the money goes in a taco truck", would be able to do do a napkin sketch of that in under a minute. "Describe at least one business problem amenable to a software solution that a taco truck has" does not strike me as being terribly difficult. (Actually selling it to them in a scalable fashion? Much more difficult, but that's largely because they're a taco truck.)

What is your opinion on the effectiveness of speaking to people and asking them directly about their problems?

I find that listen to people is often an effective strategy for learning from them. I feel I have to add the disclaimer "That is my sincere attempt to answer that question" to that sentence. Often, not-software-people do not have a great handle on what software could actually do for them, so asking them "What software do you wish existed?" doesn't work all that well, but asking them for top-of-mind business problems is not that difficult.

Or am I better off reading industry magazines/blogs/forums and kind of examining them in their natural habitat?

These two activities don't compete with each other. Either or both are more effective than neither. Don't do neither. If you're currently doing neither, start doing either or both.

[summerlunch]

Wow okay, to be honest with you, I could not answer that question about the taco truck. But I will try to understand businesses more better. Thank you so much for your helpful answers. My head is now filled with a million more questions. Do you mind if I email you sometime?

[hiddenfeatures]

He probably doesn't. patrick@[any domain he owns] Also see http://www.kalzumeus.com/standing-invitation/

[GFischer]

Patrick is amazing, I hope we're not imposing on him too much. He helped me a lot when I did an Ask HN in the past (and he was right too :) )

[coldtea]

>Okay, your accountant example has made it clear that there is really no obvious way of finding business problems by just merely looking from the outside.

Well, if it had to be spoon fed it would have no value, because everybody and his cat would be doing it.

[bmelton]

The way I got my first big promotion was by identifying gaps in the company's processes.

In my case, I was working on the help desk, and was sort of a hobbyist programmer. Answering help desk calls on the night shift was boring work, and because I was the only one working at night, I didn't have the luxury of getting to ask others what the answer was. I either knew the answer, or knew how to find it.

Knowing how to find it was tricky. The Windows group (that supported Windows servers) kept all their information in Sharepoint. The Lotus Notes group kept all their data in Lotus Notes databases. Unix group kept all their documents on NFS shares. Each group knew how to find their data, so it was great for them. But the problem is that if the Tier 1 support can't find it, they have to escalate to Tier 2. This costs more in terms of hourly wages, delays customer satisfaction, and takes longer to solve problems.

My solution was to write a central, web-based knowledge base, and I wrote convertors to go to each of the knowledge stores and import it into the knowledge base. Now, as a Tier 1 help desk, I only had one spot to go to for finding knowledge. Customers got support faster, less calls had to be escalated to Tier 2, and all was right in the world.

Later I refined the crap out of it and made it really pretty good, but that initial implementation saved the company a lot of money. By not having to engage Tier 2 support as much, that meant they could be working on their regular jobs, like managing servers of streamlining application processes or whatever it was they were meant to do. By offloading the work to the cheaper Tier 1 help desk, that was cost effective. By reducing the time it took to satisfy a given customer request, that meant less workers could handle more calls. That's cost effective. That was a problem that they would have been willing to pay $xxx,000 to solve, because it saved them well more than that, but I just wrote it for them and let them know how much it was saving them.

I didn't initially make more money, but I did get moved into a position where I could do more of that, which I did. At some point, I was awarded for having saved the company an average of 3 million per year. At the time, my salary was something like $50k a year. I never struck gold working at that company, but "developed applications to reduce company costs by $3 million per year" looks pretty good on a resume. It sets you apart from the vast majority of developers who are just going to build what they're told to build. It shows that you take initiative, and that you care about more than just what's in the scope of your job -- you care about the company, and the company's bottom line, and can actively impact that bottom line.