What Pain-Point are you Solving and How did you discover it?
We’re all builders here, which usually means at some point we looked at something clunky, slow, or frustrating and thought, “there has to be a better way.” Most products don’t start with a grand vision; they start with irritation, curiosity, or firsthand pain.
I’d love to learn more about how others here have navigated that journey:
• How did you uncover the problem you decided to work on?
• What signals told you this problem was worth solving?
• How did you validate (if at all) whether people would actually pay for a solution?
• Has your product stayed true to the original problem, or did it evolve into something different?
• What surprised you the most along the way?
If there’s anything else you’ve learned, good or bad, feel free to share. The honest stories are usually the most helpful.
And of course, feel free to plug what you’re building as well as you may have the solution to a problem somebody else is looking for!
Replies
Great thread, here's my honest story.
How I uncovered the problem:
I work closely with service business owners, the kind running HVAC, plumbing, cleaning crews, that sort of thing. I kept noticing the same thing: they were busy, but they didn't actually know if they were making money. Not because the data wasn't there. It was. It lived across 3, 4, sometimes 5 different reports inside their software. The problem was that pulling it all together took too long, so they just… didn't. They'd check at the end of the week, or the end of the month, and by then it was too late to do anything about it.
The phrase I kept hearing was: "I think we're fine… but I don't actually know." That was the pain.
What told me it was worth solving:
The signal wasn't one conversation, it was the same conversation, over and over, with different owners. The frustration wasn't about lacking data. It was about lacking a fast answer. There's a big difference. When someone says "I don't have time to check," that's a product problem, not a knowledge problem.
Validation:
Honestly? I built a rough version first and put it in front of real users. The reaction wasn't "oh cool". It was "wait, can I keep this?" That told me enough. Willingness to use something immediately beats any survey.
Has it stayed true to the original problem?
Yes, maybe more so than when I started. The core is still the same: compress multiple reports into one view, show the gap between where you are and where you need to be, and make it readable in seconds. What evolved was understanding that the timing matters as much as the clarity. It's not just "where are you this week", it's "is what's happening this week going to hurt what comes next?"
Biggest surprise:
How much people underestimate the cost of not knowing in time. Most owners assumed they'd catch problems eventually. What they didn't realize was that a slow week doesn't just hurt that week, it rolls forward and quietly kills the next one too.
---
What I built is called The Nut Report — a real-time decision tool for service business owners using Housecall Pro. It takes what normally lives across 3–5 reports and compresses it into one view: are you on track this week, how far off are you, and is it going to affect what's coming next. All in about 10 seconds.
It's not accounting software. It's not a dashboard. It's just a fast, clear answer when you need to make a call mid-week.
If that sounds like something you or someone you know needs, I'd genuinely appreciate you taking a look and an upvote means a lot 🙏
👉 https://www.producthunt.com/products/the-nut-report?utm_source=other&utm_medium=social
I am solving the problem of AI slop in generated content.
You might ask why I bother with so many humanizers out there.
Humanizers don't actually solve the problem of AI slop, it just solves the problem of passing AI detectors.
Once, I had a piece of content to write and I was pressed for time, so I used an AI tool to generate it. But it read so badly of AI, that I decided to humanize it.
This humanizing tool turned my phrase, "This is how Playwright workers behave in CI..." to "This is how Playwright staff behave in CI..."
It didn't have the technical awareness and then entirely ruined the message of the content.
This is when I thought to myself that it can be better. The problem people have with AI content is the very obvious patterns like words and structure and the lack of depth.
I solved that using the banned lexicon feature and built it into Ozigi.
What we do at Ozigi is to make sure that AI slop words or structures do not make it into your generated content at all.
We have a very robust list of banned AI words, structures and patterns that the engine is fed at the API level, after which it passes through several regex filters to make sure that the produced content already reads and sounds natural, before the editor edits in their personal naunces into it.
Designer in Oregon. I run qrchameleon.com.
I had been using Bitly for short links and qr codes but my clients and myself got fed up with the constant gating at every turn, so I set out to create a tool more powerful, more feature rich that didn't require a massive budget to get access to.
The AI chameleon avatar ended up being the surprise vs the "tool". People have been having fun designing their chameleons and using them as an affiliate tool. Each chameleon that gets created by a user gets it's own searchable page in the chameleon gallery. Anybody who signs up through that users chameleon automatcally get's 30% commission on their paid plan, month after month.
So what started as "I'm tired of paying too much for qr codes and short links," has now morphed into a full stack qr code and short link generator and management tool with a goofey AI generated chameleon avatar angle that I'm certainly stoked on!
When I retired from being an Enterprise Software Sales Executive, I bought a motorhome (RV) and have been travelling Australia.
Trying to get the darn thing level so the fridge would work and the bathroom door would sty either shut or open was a regular occurrence for me. I watched other owners and owners of caravans (travel trailers) go through this every time they arrived at camp. Many sites in Australia are not level and require ramps to get vehicles flat.
I polled a number of social media sites focussed on travellers and found out that nearly 50% of all vehicle owners (150 responses) use either their best guess or a manual spirit level.
I looked at other software solutions and hardware/software solutions to this problem. They ranged in price from free to over $300. Fully auto systems with hydraulic rams go for over $8000. If people are willing to pay for that, a $9.99 once off is less than 2 cups of coffee.
I'm launching here on Tuesday and currently plan to stay true to the original concept. Anything else would mean losing my identity as a motorhome/caravan levelling solution.
What surprised me the most is how difficult it is to get noticed. The marketing and business development is so much harder than the solution coding. (I'm purposefully not using Play Store or App store.)
The products are at OzLevel
I got burnt buying an online course. The ads promised one thing. The terms said something completely different.
I was furious after years of the same thing. Broke. Couldn't afford it. It happened for years.
So I started talking to AI about it and Red Flag AI Pro was born. A scanner that checks marketing copy against real advertising law, FTC, GDPR, ASA, ACCC, and CASL in 60 seconds. 16 risk categories. Plain English results. Exact rewrites.
The validation was simple. I couldn't find a single tool that did this. Not one.
Active now at a discount. Full launch Tuesday. 🚩
Hey Jake and everyone here!
We all want to automate workflows and save time on tedious functions. In the case of our business, the pain point is yet to be widespread but likely will be eventually - an agent spending your money improperly.
As someone working in corporate finance, I'm well aware of how tedious accounts payable processes can be within a company. They can be tedious outside of a company just with basic things like buying household supplies. At this point in history, a slew of buzzwords (chiefly AI agents) struck us as configurable solutions to automating purchasing, but they opened up entirely new problems.
The signal that this problem was worth solving was the existence of a currently existing solution that mapped very similarly onto what we are doing: cybersecurity. Whether required by law or simply because it is best practice, both businesses and individuals spend billions of dollars on cybersecurity solutions each year. For some, the option certainly exists to protect themselves by not using new technologies, but whether it be for fear of seeming like the Unabomber or a desire to enjoy the benefits of technological innovation, most elect to use new tech.
In a similar vein, the validation that people would pay for this product is the existence of the behemoth cybersecurity industry. Damage control and damage prevention with technologies that are new to people are things most are willing to pay for, evidenced by the industries built around them.
Our product has stayed true to the original problem. There will certainly be solutions in the future that will cause us to add new business lines, but for now, there is enough of an issue waiting to be addressed first.
Despite the plethora of new ideas out there, we were surprised by the lack of solutions out there for agents, particularly security solutions. This discovery only made us more inspired to build this solution
We would love for any of you to check it out and give us any feedback you may have! Please feel free to shoot me an email at reagan@agentpays.dev and we could run through a platform demo and give you promo codes to try it out!