Business problems worth solving

Adapted from a recent response to an Indiehackers topic Mission vs Money: What do you prioritize?

I think you need both. I try to find the balance this way:

1. There’s a lot of potential business ideas.
2. A subset of them will have some output/side-effect that is on-mission for you.
3. Try out all those ideas. A subset of them will work.

For example my mission is climate. Very easy to not be able to live off your climate efforts though: nonprofits, thanksless work, civic engagement, etc.

So now

1. of all business ideas I think of
2. I only consider doing the subset that could have a climate impact.
3. I try most of those in the subset. A subset of them hopefully will work :)

Below, I’m starting to keep a running list of business problems, a subset of them with impact.

• Solar
  • Sales decks take time. B2B Sales PDF Maker SaaS for solar installers - Tesla style solar sales presentation tool for everyone else - $59/mo
  • Solar platforms are a race to the bottom.
  • Solar installers have issues tracking applicants across financing, before site survey.
• Sustainability
  • Low energy apartment washing machine
• Drones
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HitJ8r9HwBg
  • EVTOL
• Homes
  • Prefab and printing houses
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-4S7cdo3tY
• EVs
  • https://electrade.app: Tired of High Gas Prices? Best EV lease list: 10x less calling, 20% more affordable (text dealer // get updates on this lease)
  • Contract manufacturing, design, software, cheap chinese EVs: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/04/14/all-change
• News
  • Incentivized to be negative, and balanced news is hard to find and monetize. Positive News Newsletter SaaS - (obviously broken, big market). train a newsbot on good seed, find non-negative headlines with sentiment analysis? - $10/mo
  • People only consume debates as clips on social media and miss bigger context.
  • Potential competitors, b2b: Media monitoring, sentiment analysis, b2b for agencies
  • Mastodon instances are run by unpaid volunteers and lack a business model. Buy a cool short domain and host a paid, reliable mastodon instance. $1/mo
• Linux
  • Linux mobile doesn’t have a notepad that syncs (freemium, flathub) - SaaS $2/mo for syncing (based off video watch count for below, market is only around 2-5k people)
  • Linux e-book reader/store (Update: Foliate)
  • Linux-ready phone with smd845 not ready
  • Flathub app: build & deploy blog from linux mobile
• websites
  • Wordpress is still used for most blogs. CDN content platform SaaS for content websites - NotablePress, DecapCMS, Hugo, Cloudways, Nuxtpress - $6/mo
  • Shopify plug-in uninstaller speedup
  • Clone Hey world as b2b SaaS for $30/mo. Founders write great emails, marketers write bad blog posts. Let the founders send emails to the blog.
• Climate Fintech
  • It’s hard to decarbbonize your investments. - Inyova.ch
  • https://www.joinatmos.com
• Hospital prices are hard to compare
• Impact quizzes / web apps SaaS? EV charging configurator, solar configurator, gas configurator, what climate type are you.
• AI
  • https://keras.io/examples/vision/3D_image_classification/) (example: Keras model trained to create art from inputs) (update: this now exists :))
  • https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither
• National quarter shortage: quarter delivery service. Hard to deliver though.
• Heat pumps
• blockchain
• artificial meat
• energy
• farming
• water
• transportation
• biodiversity
• studio for climate saving software
• Time tested classic: clone another badly-run business better (maybe with existing demand) - solarbalkon
• Odd Solar