"Make it something you'd actually use" is of great value to a budding (aimless, excited) programmer, but staying too long in this mindset leads to a glut of products and services serving the same purpose for the same market. The highly-upvoted "Hello Ladies" video with patio11[1] really drove home the point that products for people who aren't programmers have tremendous value. This post is good advice to get started, but once new programmers begin to feel comfortable with their abilities, it would behoove them to empathize with people who aren't like them and try to make something others would appreciate.
The problem is it's hard to solve problems in an arena that you're not personally passionate about. I've been facing this problem with app development lately and found that the apps I'm passionate about sell better then the ones where I feel like I'm just trying to serve a niche. The reason why isn't for lack of motivation, but rather for lack of comprehension.
+1. I never really liked the "build it for yourself" mantra. If this were true, we'd have tons of programming IDEs and project management software. What programmers and entrepreneurs really need to serve are markets where programmers are under represented. I'm talking about agriculture, natural resources, transport, finance, manufacturing, etc.
> If this were true, we'd have tons of programming IDEs and project management software.
Your assuming programmers' only interests are programming related. I'm currently building a site that sells trail mix and another to organize gear lists for backpacking. This is because I am involved in those spaces and I would like to improve the experience for the people I share it with.
I'm sure there are many programmers who are interested in agriculture, natural resources, transport, finance, and manufacturing.
I'm not saying programmers don't have other interests, just that programming is usually their main interest which leads them to build products targeted at programmers (there's quite a lot of empirical evidence to back this observation: just look at all the "Show HN" we're getting here). I think it takes at least a conscious effort to get interested by say agriculture, unless you were raised on a farm :). More people need to make that conscious effort. Interdisciplinarity is where the real money is at.
Yeah, solving a personal problem is not the be all and end all. If you want success, you could always spend some time in an industry like farming. It'd take time, and probably would mean a year or 2 working in the industry to truly understand the problems that exist, but once you find a solution to a common problem that'd sure be one business where there is serious income potential. Of course not many hackers (if any) would take such a route...
A $99/month service is milk money to a farmer (not sure if pun is intended).
I do software development by day and have a cash crop farming operation on the side, so I have familiarity with both industries. I think an agricultural-based software startup would be mighty interesting.
However, the bulk of my problems on the farm are related to interfacing with third-party businesses. They have no incentive to improve their processes because the average farmer is 55 years old and would rather bang a hammer than bang a keyboard, and I cannot improve my processes without direct access to their data.
Your advice is sound, but personally I have found it to be not a very inspiring place for a startup yet. The low hanging fruit, at least as far as my operation is concerned, I find is already solved well enough. As some of the older farmers who fear computers move into retirement, however, I think the landscape will quickly change and some big opportunities will rapidly appear. I am looking forward to it.
Out of curiosity (I have no experience with RPGs aside from a bit of AD&D2 15 years ago), what kinds of tools do you make? Character generation, that sort of thing?
Incidentally, the title of this HN post sounds like a good strategy for developing just about any product.
I played Traveller, so it was a bit of everything: character generation, planet and system generation, space craft generation, hell, they even had a half-dozen "alien languages" that you could create programmatically.
Ah, I've always wanted to play Traveler. I started working on a space-faring game myself, but lost the time to other projects. I did make a new old-school fantasy rpg a few years ago, though. It's called Wayfarers. My nome de plume is Swill.
Some day, I want to release another edition of the game as a tablet app.
The title says it all. I've been working on a project for quite some time when it suddenly dawned on me (as target release date after release date kept slipping) that what I am actually building is an assembly of many functions and that I should (1) break each of those functions down into individual components (2) because they are something I already use and so do others, (3) release each of those components with the first part and then add-on as the next is complete... finally ending up with what I had in mind in the first place.
Another good quote I saw recently was how we mix up the Minimally Viable Product and the Desired Viable Product.
Funny... we can read and study all we want but it takes a while to sink in and be applied, doesn't it?
Reminds me of the first project that was entirely my own idea, at age 14 or so, a system to manage customer accounts for my paper route. Written in TI99 BASIC. Data file saved to a cassette tape. It worked, but I ultimately realized that it was much easier to just use a paper ledger so I didn't really iterate on the solution. I could update the accounts on paper in the time it took the computer to load the program and data from the cassette.
I was using Photoshop to pick colors from design PSD´s and PNG´s. Then I found two nice color libraries, added my boring app framework and created this - http://teppefall.com/products/colorspace.
The problem is risk.. do you spend a $1000 on good sales copy and some Adsense when you might only get $900 back short term ? Your product is good, but is it good enough?
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2371965 -- this comment does not reflect the opinions of patio11