I touched this subject in another discussion a few days ago briefly. Here is what I've learned over the years:

People keep repeating that you should work on ideas that solve problems that you have yourself. Now given some time on your own, it's natural to start looking at your problems and seeing how to solve them for yourself and potentially others and make a profit along the way. If you want a sinister spin on this, nothing sells better than fear or hope.

But this is HN and as far as tech people go, our instinct is to solve problems that are given to us. And often when we have problems on our own, we come up with a solution and don't really think about it twice. I was recently talking with someone about a project they had at their work and how their company paid something like 3 million euros to another company to build a "platform" for them. And given that their company isn't that large or doesn't have that many users (say 40k/month tops), that raised my eyebrow a bit. So I asked them to show me what that "platform" was. Long story-short, a website with a username and password registration, email verification, paypal subscription, which allows you to download a list of PDF's.

To a developer the whole concept sounds like a joke - anyone with a few months of experience can mash that up in two weeks. "Oh but we have so many users and traffic, it's not that simple."

Bruh... 40k users/month, 100 pdf's, ~2mb each is something a raspberry pi can serve without any issues.

The truth is, most tech people are very much detached from reality(granted that the mass of people is the reality and not the other way around). We try to fix problems which we really don't have ourselves and we over-engineer the crap out of them. And commonly this is the result of the so called "idea generation". It's easy to create a startup that solves a niche problem. But we often fail to acknowledge how tiny these niches really are. It's easier to sell something that costs 10000 euros to 10 people and make 100k as opposed to selling something for 5 euros to 20000 people.

The truth is, most people create 5 euro products which have a potential audience of 10 people, hence the reason why they make 50 euros as opposed to 100k. You can scroll through PH for days and keep repeating "omg, who needs this?!?!?"

I know I have. And truthfully I doubt many people have hit the 50 euro mark, not to mention the 100k.

But people make that mistake all the time. We are surrounded by people who will hook up an led to an arduino which will blink when someone mentions them on slack while they are watching a movie, while ordinary people are looking at a website which has payments and they think that's quantum physics. Tech people and ordinary people live in parallel universes at this point. The ideas we come up with are solutions to problems no one has. That's the reason why SaaS is proving to be a lot more successful strategy than B2C.

My take on this is that every time you come up with an idea, don't bother sharing it with your tech friends first. In most cases you will get a 50-50 positive-negative response. Find people who are completely detached from your world and have no idea what the difference between a USB and RJ45 is.

1. Can you explain your idea in 4 sentences or less?

2. Do they understand it?

3. Do they have that problem?

3a(if Y on 3). Do they have a working solution, even if it takes 3 times the effort?

If the answers to those are:

1. No

2. No

3. No

3a. Yes

Then don't bother. You will almost certainly fail.