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Comment by laughinghan | Hacker News Reader

Just ask. People absolutely love talking about their problems, it'll probably be the most animated thing they have to say about the business they're in.

"Some people profess difficulty at finding applications to write. I have never understood this: talk to people. People have problems — lots of problems, more than you could enumerate in a hundred lifetimes. Talk to a carpenter, ask him what about carpentry sucks. Talk to the receptionist at your dentist’s office — ask her what about her job sucks. Talk to a teacher — ask her what she spends time that she thinks adds the least value to her day."

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busi...

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The "just ask" approach is very tricky. It does not emphasize a critical element : Most people love to rant and complain about things that annoy or bother them. People rarely if ever get to ideas to solve problems or even to describing the underlying problem.

> People rarely if ever get to ideas to solve problems or even to describing the underlying problem.

That's your job. Develop hypotheses about what the underlying problem is and ask them questions to try to falsify them. Develop hypotheses about solutions and build mockups or proofs-of-concept and have them try them out to falsify them.

No one will hand you a business idea on a platter. But problems to solve are the easiest thing to find in the world.

You're right its my job to find solution to problems.

I meant to say 'Just Ask' and 'Problems to solve are easiest to find in the world' are very misleading things for a beginner.

Just asking won't lead you to a solution and identifying solvable problems are incredibly hard.

The question I was answering was: "How do you guys network with the right business people to speak their language and find out how their processes work?"

I don't think "just ask" is misleading at all. The fact that most people will happily complain about their business processes but won't have ideas to solve them doesn't make it "tricky", it makes it an opportunity.

There might be fields of endeavor where identifying solvable problems is incredibly hard, maybe in academia or politics, but business processes? Execution and, if you want to get rich, scaling up are hard. But identifying solvable problems with people's business processes is totally one of the "easiest [things] in the world".

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