[chowes]

> Call around, talk to your network. I don’t just mean those ~300 people you’ve never met on LinkedIn, but your actual family, Facebook friends, etc. ... Figure out what the problems that they’re having are. Solve exactly the problems they express

This is, imo, the biggest hurdle for engineers who want to become entrepreneurs. I've seen so many HN posts about people trying to crowd source startup problems, trying to automate away this piece and just get down to coding. I too struggled with this for the longest time. I felt like a solution looking for a problem. Just give me a problem, any problem, and I'll build the best damn app and be on my way!

But that's not how it works. If you want to stop being an engineer, you need to stop acting like one. Engineers have their problems roughly scoped and entered in a JIRA board. Entrepreneurs have to go find problems to solve. You want to go be an entrepreneur? Go learn to talk to people. Go learn to listen to others, empathize, and to convince people to believe in you. You will be a company of one - so go build out your personal sales & marketing departments.

[brtkdotse]

A key thing most developers wanting the become entrepreneurs miss (I certainly did) is that more often then not coding something is the slowest and/or most expensive way to solve someone’s problem. Many, many business ideas could probably just be a Wordpress site with a small plugin which you can farm off to Upwork for a pittance that doesn’t make for a very good “Show HN”.

[cercatrova]

But that's not fun to build. And I suspect this is where the dichotomy comes in. Engineers want to have something that's fun to build while also making money, which can be the problem.

[stets]

I believe this is very common with web devs as well who argue all day over wordpress vs static site vs whatever. What works best? Usually the solution that is quick and web dev for small brochure sites is more a marketing skill than a technical one.

[soulnothing]

Honest question, is this worth it? I've noticed the same thing. Most requirements are simple, and can be done via upwork freelancer etc. What you can provide is extra customer service or maintenance. But that seems like a race to the bottom.

Whenever I come across these, it's in the territory of not worth my free time. But for the more complex projects they want a whole team, and I've found it's difficult as a solo person to sale that.

[bigmit37]

Yes! This is something I have noticed as well and it’s requiring a little rewiring of my brain.

[soulnothing]

I spent a lot of time going to angel rounds, vc meetups. Talking to a lot of people about their issues, what they needed. It was a great way to get exposed to a myriad of problems. Angel.co is also a good one for finding places where some one has an idea, but needs tech help.

The problem I had. Is that a majority of what I came across was mobile and web orientated. As a back-end dev, it's not something I can help with. Especially when for the pitch deck metrics/numbers and a pretty demo are the big selling points.

[elliotbnvl]

This is a great, great point. I struggled with this feeling for a while too. It's amazingly frustrating.