Ask HN: What work problems would your company pay to solve?

I’m researching ideas for a new B2B product and want to understand real bottlenecks teams face.

What problems, inefficiencies, or recurring frustrations do you or your team deal with at work—where, if a solid solution existed, your company would actually pay for it?

Examples could include:

manual workflows

data or reporting pain points

communication gaps

compliance or documentation hassles

tools your team keeps hacking together internally

anything expensive, slow, or annoying

Would love to hear your role/industry (optional) and the specific problem you face.

12 points | by aryanchaurasia 20 hours ago

4 comments

  • raw_anon_1111 18 hours ago
    Neither my company nor any of the five companies I’ve worked for over the past ten years would ever trust any of their business to a one person SaaS shop we would throw some developers on it first.

    Let me take that back. I was the developer lead for a company from 2016-2018 and we found this 2 person SaaS with a product that we needed. We were going to be 65% of his revenue if we signed the deal.

    I spoke to my CTO and lawyers. We made the guy offer us a self hosted version and escrow his code with a third party that we would have the rights to depending on certain events.

    [-]
    • greazy 11 hours ago
      > We made the guy offer us a self hosted version and escrow his code with a third party that we would have the rights to depending on certain events.

      The guy agreed to this? Damn

      [-]
      • raw_anon_1111 7 hours ago
        There was a lot of legalese. But it boiled down to if he stopped working on it or got a hit by a bus.
  • ungreased0675 18 hours ago
    I want a way of tracking all the major decisions leaders in the organization make. I’d then like those decisions scored over time, so we can discover who makes good decisions and who doesn’t.
    [-]
    • al_borland 14 hours ago
      The first decision they’ll make is not to buy a product that creates accountability for them while putting them under a microscope.
  • lovich 12 hours ago
    The main problem most of my bosses at any level above me have had is that employees exist and add to opex.

    If you can convert all continuing labor to 1 time spend on capital expenditures, then you’ll have a secure niche in the market

  • brudgers 16 hours ago
    This sounds less like a product and more like a consulting business. There’s nothing wrong with that and consulting businesses sometimes are able to spin out products…consulting is also a possible way to generate revenue and build a team while developing a product. Good luck.
    [-]
    • raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago
      So the next logical question is what special skills or experience does he have that would make people hire him as a “consultant” instead of a run of the mill staff augmentation contractor?