To Find Problems To Solve Just Listen To What People Complain About
In a report to Congress in 1843, Henry Ellsworth, a Patent Office Commissioner, stated: “The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.”
It’s been almost 180 years since then. Millions of new works of art and inventions were brought to this world, proving that we, humans, are extremely capable of coming up with new ideas and changing the world again and again. If you ever think that you can’t come up with an idea for your business or app because every problem seems to be solved already, remembering what Mr. Ellsworth said.
Listen to what people complain about
There’s no such thing as a problem completely solved. To create something new, you just need the right mindset. Then, listen to what people complain about or ask yourself what the last thing you were frustrated about in an existing product was.
For example, you may love to gather with the family for dinner and cook chicken using a special recipe your grandma told you. To do that, you need to buy the chicken a few days before and soak it in a special sauce.
One day you may realize that you forgot to do it in advance. Wouldn’t it be nice to buy pre-made chicken using your grandma’s recipe so that you just need to put it into the oven for an hour? That’s a product idea my friend Nataly came up with some time ago.
Some Real-life Examples
I have some more ideas about solving food problems, probably because I’m writing this before lunch.
Have you ever bought a pre-washed salad mix? It’s an outstanding example of how simplifying a customer’s life allows you to sell seemingly the same product for a higher price. Salad mix simplifies the “cook the salad” problem — you just buy a mix (with the seasoning included or not) and take it out of the box at home. No more thinking, no more picking different kinds of greens, washing them, and so on.
There are also baby carrots. Someone improved a seemingly commoditized product — a carrot. They washed them, made them bite-sized and instantly edible like chips and voila — you have a totally new product, a healthy snack that is easier to use than regular carrots.
The Internet Isn’t Perfect Either
Do you think Amazon is perfect and can’t be any better? It’s a vast and very successful online business, one of the few that keeps growing despite the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Bookshop, a startup But is it perfect? Bookshop.org founder and CEO Andy Hunter doesn’t think so. He created a startup that tries to solve Amazon’s biggest problem — its destructive attitude towards small and independent businesses.
Every big household app has flaws. Do you think Gmail Is it perfect? Not really, they’re doing terrible job sorting the mail for you. They’ve added tabs and few other neat features from Inbox, their experimental email client. However, I’m still missing emails because they’re incorrectly attributed to tabs unless I manually assign each sender to a tab. Quite a task if you have hundreds of emails every day.
There’s a huge opportunity to improve email experience, and apps like Superhuman are trying to make our life easier, even though most of the users are using Gmail. The thing is, users are using existing products because no one offered them anything better. Your job is figuring out what “better” means for users by listening to their frustrations with the current solutions.
Things I’m frustrated With
If you’re like me, you may have trouble coming up with new FCMG products, I get it. I barely notice when something is wrong with the food, I just work my way around it. But I have an eye for problems in apps, and you need to have it too if you want to come up with app ideas. Here’s a couple of my examples so that you can notice similar emotions when you’re frustrated with something and hopefully come up with an idea.
I was working negotiating a contract recently and was pretty frustrated with the process. The workflow I had to go through was sending MS Word files back and forth with redlining enabled. It’s terrible, to say the least. There’s a slightly better option of using Google Docs collaboration features, but it’s still pretty frustrating (if you ever resolved a comment thread in a document and spend half an hour finding it — you know what I mean). There’s still no viable tool to redline and collaborate on documents (at least not the one I know of). If you ever create one — please let me know!
Or, I had to help a colleague to prepare a CV. Do you remember the last time you created a CV? We all do pretty much the same things at work, But HR managers want to see true gems of copywriting on your CV.
I usually open a site like Indeed.com, searching for catchy and good looking phrases in CVs of others for inspiration. My friend was working as a developer at his previous job and can’t really say anything special about it (mostly because of NDA). After some browsing of resumes, I wrote that he was “Designing a robust API architecture” and “Migrated legacy content-distribution system” instead of just “were writing code for last five years” as he told me.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an app that has a database of jobs and would offer catchy phrases you could add to the resume? Kind of like fortune cookie app on Linux does — every time you run it, you get a new piece of wisdom. Maybe I’ll be the one to create an app like that (I probably won’t, feel free to do it).
Ideas are flying around. All we have to do is let ourselves loose and start noticing things that are broken. For some fun things that are broken, check out this Seth Godin talk at the Gel conference in 2006.
