Hi, I'm an entrepreneur looking for a startup idea.
In my experience, the reason most startups fail is because they never actually solve anyone's problem. So I'm cheating and starting out by identifying a specific person with a specific problem.
So I'm asking you, what's the most annoying part of your life/job? Also, how much would you pay for a solution?
I don't have this problem, but a lot of people I know pay astonishing amounts of money for day care. If you could figure out a way to build the Starbucks of day care, you could probably make billions of dollars. Similarly for elder care.
You develop a system for setting up and running a day care center, in the same way that Starbucks has a system for running coffee shops. That gives you economies of scale, because you only need to develop the system once, and then you can copy it across the country. What are the best toys? How do you physically set up the center? How do you manage the pickup transition (what do you do if a parent is chronically late to pickup?) Do you include a transportation (bus/van) service to get kids to the center?
Then you also develop a brand, which gives you a huge marketing advantage. New parents wonder where to send their kids to day care, and the LironCare brand is already at the top of their mind.
Having a brand also makes you more trustworthy, for game theory reasons, and there's nothing more important in day care than trust. Parents know that if there's a fiasco at any one LironCare center, that's going to be a huge black mark for the entire company, and they know you know that too, and so will work 100% to make sure there's no fiasco.
Aging. I would pay $20,000 a year to stop aging, more if I could figure out a way to increase my income.
what's the most annoying part of your life/job?
Pain. Moderate but constant pain from old sports injuries makes me: spend money on pain meds and counter irritants, work longer hours because the pain is distracting and reduces my productivity, limit physical activity and travel, deviate from an optimal exercise routine, fall into a black hole of grumpiness occasionally.
how much would you pay for a solution?
If by "solution" you mean an easy, one-time, guaranteed fix: $10,000
Needing to have a job to support myself. But I suspect that is a problem that entrepreneurs will have great difficulty solving.
I would appreciate a service that would provide long-term guidance to programmers. More like a guild than like a job agency.
I imagine something like this: You would pay a small yearly membership fee. In return you would get an access to a guild forum (where members provide information to each other), and a subscription to a digital newspaper (where the guild provides the most important information to the members). For a higher fee, you could get some personal counseling or training. The guild would provide information about the job market; e.g. which techn...
A reading experience that is comparable to that offered by printed books.
E-book readers are clunky to configure and to upload to, have shitty impagination, are very slow.
I have trouble falling asleep at normal times and have been blocking blue light at night sometimes by wearing blue-blocking glasses but also by having red lights in my home office. I would like a bright lamp whose light would automatically change based on the time of day. I recently spent $75 buying smart light bulbs whose color can be changed by my iPad but I have to change the color myself several times each day.
I travel a lot for work, usually one to two weeks in a city. The annoying part of my life is finding things to do, or people to meet that are understanding of that. For either dating or just hanging out and doing activities. Right now I use a mash up of meetup, dating sites and couchsurfing, but none of them are really satisfying.
This is what annoys me the most currently in my life: perfectly fine things going to the trash.
I've read that comic series, and probably won't pick it up again. What do I do? I do not have the storage space to save them indefinitely, nor anybody is going to accept it (comics are at an all time low marketing value where I live). So I throw them away.
The same thing for books, old hdds, modems, keyboards, laptop, cd's, etc.
There's an enormous waste of material goods.
Here’s an entire class of approaches that I never hear about Silicon Valley types attempting. Perhaps that’s because there isn’t any money to be made there, or perhaps it’s because the problems aren’t as interesting or fun. Mostly though, I think it’s just salience of the problems. It’s the p<10^45 filter that Scott Alexander discusses in I can tolerate anything but the outgroup. But before I try and shed some light on the other side of the filter, let me describe why that category might be a bad place for a startup, and why you should do it anyway.
Broa...
This is probably not the biggest annoyance, but it's recurring and it affects a lot of people (especially the approximately 9% with hyperacusis): many buses and garbage trucks have horrible screeching brakes. This is bad in general, but especially bad at 7am before I want to be awake.
Presumably it can be solved with some kind of regular maintenance. I doubt municipalities are interested in spending that money, but if somehow the affected residents could coordinate to pay (maybe with some kind of crowdfunding), and someone would organize the whole thing, then something could be done.
There is a serious shortage of medical specialists that accept Medicaid, especially psychiatrists... it probably has something to do with Medicaid reimbursements being below market rates...
Dry skin. During the winter the skin on my feet gets painfully dry. I have tried lots of creams and while they help, they don't eliminate the problem. I would pay $400 a year to fix this issue.
Edit: I have learned that my dry skin is caused by Raynaud's syndrome and the solution is to not let my hands and feet get cold.This /r/askreddit post that I just posted might be helpful as well, since you're presumably not just looking to solve rationalist's problems.
EDIT: Unfortunately, it didn't pick up at all. Oh well.
If you are bad at grammar, you can also use https://www.scribbr.com/proofreading-editing/ ! They will make sure your academic documents are without mistakes :)
Aren't people on LessWrong quite good at solving their own problems? So if you're looking for low-hanging fruit (which there should be many out there), here is the wrong place. (At least this is my expectation. I'm not following LW too closely.) See here for someone who knows how to find good (and profitable) problems to solve: https://philipmorganconsulting.com/resources/
An annoying thing (not major, but annoying) for me is that I am usually unable to make my kid interested in drawing point-to-point (like this ). He just doesn't find the images worth the trouble. If there was a way to create templates off pictures that he would "get", I would probably pay 50 cents per unprinted image (and I think some people would pay more.)
A problem I might have when making music is not knowing how it sounds to other people. Naturally you want all the intended details in your music to be noticed, but someone you just linked a song to might have listened to it on a phone, or using sub par headphones, or maybe on good headphones or speakers but you fine tuned your song to sound good on your headphones. Every audio equipment will have certain differences, it might have different EQ, might have more or less bass than you expected, etc. So, maybe not easily done yet, but getting to experience or ...
Reviews online that are trustworthy. I've been travelling a lot and hotel reviews require some intelligence to determine trust. e.g. someone who says 'the lady at the front desk was rude to me, and they had bed bugs'.. well that basically means they felt insulted by the person at the front desk and the bed bug thing is probably just the worst thing they can imagine saying.
I want a better way to eliminate any of the hindrances to having productive relationships with people I would respect if I could find them.
Mental energy. I would like to be able to maximize the amount of "deep work" that I can do.
Roughly, I should be willing to pay quite a lot for this. If I value my deep work time at $X/hr and my non-deep-work hours at $Y/hr and I can increase the amount of "deep work" hours I work in a week by A, then I should break even at paying $A*(X-Y).
I was just listeing to an NPR piece about the problem of workplace noise, with some focus on noisy co-workers. For example, working near someone with a frequent loud cough is a miserable thing.
I don't know if there's a munchkin solution, but possibly being a noise consultant for businesses is a possible niche. Perhaps just selling white noise machines in bulk to businesses would work.
I heard that some employers ask the job candidates for their GitHub accounts, so they can check the quality of code these people write in their free time. I have no idea how frequent is this; I really hope it doesn't become an industry standard, because I believe in separation between job and free time. But if it does become a standard, here is a business opportunity...
Create GitHub accounts in other people's names, and provide high-quality patches to open-source software from there.
The idea is that you would find someone who is a good programmer and loves...
Is there a service I can call that will go through a room filled knee-deep with "stuff" and "put it away" on shelves and things so that most objects are accessible? Maid services just clean up dirt, they won't declutter or bring in need shelves to organize a DVD collection that is overflowing the tiny bookshelf that it's on, and most "junk removal" services seem like they would just throw everything out.
Grammar. I'm horrible at grammar and would love software that could reliably fix all of my grammatical mistakes. I would pay $400 a year for such software.
Like most college students, I am annoyed that I am poor. I would like a way to sell the spare computing power of my laptop over the Internet to people who would pay for it, like deep learning folks. I would be willing to share 50% of the profits with anyone who can figure out how to do this.
I think one area where the private sector is strangely inactive is weather forecasting , it has so many potential clients ranging from farmers to vacationers ...actual models are useless beyond a 15-day timeframe
The commentary below has focused on child care - a more salient pain point for our demographic, surely - but the "elder care" angle actually seems much more promising. Still labor-intensive, but fewer regulatory nightmares (?).
Note there are some very large regional players in this game, but there don't appear to be any Starbucks-size winners (so says my wife, who often works with the elderly).