HACKER Q&A
📣 jlim13

How to hunt for business ideas while working at companies?


I’m always curious how engineers/product people discover new business/startup ideas while solving their current problems at work. Let’s say you are working in some specific domain like ML models for ads ranking/marketplace or designing and maintaining the payments API, how do you go about finding problems that touch the space of your day job that are ready to be solved? In my limited experience, these low hanging fruits are not necessarily obvious to mid level ICs. Of course I could be completely wrong and just haven’t looked in the right places or asked the right questions. What should I be looking for? Who should I be talking to?

An example of such a startup origin story is this company that was acquired by Shopify. The first bit talks about how the founder came up with this idea after having worked at a company in a similar space. https://www.unusual.vc/post/deliverrs-product-market-fit-journey-michael-krakaris-on-enabling-prime-for-all-e-commerce

I’m sure it wasn’t as linear of a story as it’s written, but I still think it’s a good example.

Would love to hear everyone's thoughts!

  👤 al_borland Accepted Answer ✓
In almost any job there are going to be things that are annoying, frustrating, or harder than you think they need to be. Those are the opportunity. “If only X existed, I wouldn’t have to do all this nonsense.” Then go build X.

Of course if you’re working for a company and the idea is closely linked to your current role, you’d probably need to read up on your companies policies, or check with whatever department, to make sure it’s cool to move forward with it as your own thing and it’s not simply part of your job.

It could also be about building platform, which is more like the interview. Working at a company, and solving a problem for that company is one thing. What if there is a way to solve that problem more generally, so people can simply plug into it instead of rolling their own solution. Here again, you’d probably need to check with the lawyers. Some companies will say they aren’t interested in that business, like when Woz bright the Apple 1 to HP. Others, like Amazon, turned their in-house solutions into a product to sell to customers with AWS.