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
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!
Pain: every AI chat starts from zero. No memory of who you are.
I discovered it through personal frustration – I kept re-explaining
my projects to Claude every single session.
Solution: MemPlato – a local MCP server on Android.
Claude connects and remembers everything. Launched today on PH.
Great thread. Here's my honest story.
I kept working with small Indian business teams — 4 to 5 people, running real businesses — and every single one of them was managing clients over WhatsApp. Deals tracked in a Google Sheet. Follow-ups running on memory.
The problem wasn't that they didn't know CRMs existed. They did. They'd tried Zoho. They'd looked at HubSpot. But every tool assumed they had someone dedicated to set it up, maintain it, and train the team. They didn't. So they went back to WhatsApp.
That was the irritation.
What told me it was worth solving?
I stopped seeing it as an exception and started seeing it as the default for small teams in India. 63 million micro and small businesses — and most of them are still running on chats and spreadsheets. Not because they're unsophisticated. Because no tool was built for how they actually work.
Validation?
Honest answer — I talked to agency owners and service business founders before writing a single line of code. The recurring line I kept hearing was: "I just need something simple that my staff can also use." That was enough.
Did it evolve?
Stayed true to the core. No bloat. Customers → Deals → Services → Reports. Two roles. Works on day one.
Biggest surprise?
How much people appreciate the absence of features. Every demo I've done, the first reaction is — "wait, that's it?" — but in a relieved way, not a disappointed way.
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What we built: CRM by NeerSoft — a lightweight CRM for small Indian business teams who are done fighting enterprise software.
I'm Ritesh, founder of NeerSoft Technology. Happy to swap notes with anyone building for markets outside the US/EU bubble.
memi
The pain point behind Memi is that product design teams now have powerful agents, but the context is scattered across specs, research, and Figma. We discovered the problem by watching AI outputs drift from the actual design intent once the source material changed.
mine came from pure irritation rather than any grand vision, which matches what you said. i kept hitting the same dumb wall in my own workflow and finally got annoyed enough to build the fix ngl. the signal that mattered showed up when i caught other people complaining about the exact same thing in passing, research never told me anything that direct. the grand-vision starts almost never survive contact, the irritation ones tend to
The pain: Generating personalised images at scale is surprisingly broken.
If you've ever needed to send 5,000 event certificates, localised ad creatives in 12 languages, or personalised social cards for every user you know the drill. You either:
- Sit in Figma/Photoshop manually swapping text and exporting (works for 10, breaks at 1,000)
- Stitch together a Puppeteer script that breaks every time Chrome updates
- Pay for an enterprise tool that takes weeks to integrate and costs more than your hosting
I ran into this building a campaign for a client. We had one clean design and a spreadsheet of 8,000 names. The "just automate it" path led straight into a brittle Playwright setup that I spent more time maintaining than actually using.
The insight: the design-to-image pipeline is always the same one template, variable data, rendered output. But every team solves it from scratch.
So I built PixelDrive: design the template once in a visual editor, mark what changes, then hit a URL with your data as query params. The rendered image comes back. No SDK, no setup. First render in about a second, cached repeats in 19ms.
The "URL is the API" design was deliberate I wanted something a developer could use in 5 minutes and a marketer could understand by reading the URL.
Would love to hear if anyone else has hit this what did you end up building/using?
Very simple: We were already building something similar (working in AI and video production) and then people from companies with a clear pain point approached us and spoke of it.
There is a real pressure to automate and hence accelerate video production processes. TV channels are still too dependent on old people watching television. Now, however, they do not have the resources to adapt, as new formats require much more video output at a much lower ROI.
Which is why we developed OntoVision, which helps production teams automate their workflows turning well-analysed video footage into completed productions.
How did you uncover the problem you decided to work on?
I lived it. I was the guy organizing weekly football games for a group of friends — and every week it was the same WhatsApp chaos. "Who's playing Saturday?" — 47 replies, half of them memes. Someone confirms, then drops out. You're left manually figuring out who's on the waitlist, calling people one by one. I thought: this has to be an app. So I built it.
What signals told you this problem was worth solving?
Every person I described it to immediately said "we have the exact same problem." The pain was universal and recognizable in under 10 seconds. No one needed convincing that the problem existed — only that my solution was better than just living with it.
How did you validate whether people would actually pay for a solution?
Honestly — I didn't do classic validation before building. I built a working MVP first, then put it in front of real people. The signal I watched for: would anyone actually use it consistently over WhatsApp? They did. Paid plans came after that — and the 14-day trial with no card required removes the biggest barrier to finding out.
Has your product stayed true to the original problem, or did it evolve?
The core stayed the same — kill the group chat chaos. But I didn't expect coaches and amateur league organizers to be such a strong use case. They need attendance history, PDF reports, season stats for sponsors. That pulled the product up-market from "app for friends" into something closer to lightweight team management software.
What surprised you the most along the way?
That I built the entire thing solo — no team, no agency — using AI as my coding partner. What surprised me wasn't that it was possible. It was how fast it was possible. Full SaaS product: payments, push notifications, PDF reports, admin panel, 8 languages, E2E tests, CI/CD — built by one person. That genuinely changed how I think about what a solo founder can ship.
The pain I was solving: digital fragmentation.
I counted my apps one day — Instagram, Twitter, Strava, Duolingo, WhatsApp groups for community, a separate notes app... I was living across 10+ apps and none of them "knew" the full version of me.
I discovered it when I realized I couldn't answer "who am I online" without switching between 5 different apps.
So I built Maleu — one app for social sharing, learning, fitness, communities, and AI camera direction. India's first life OS.
The insight: it's not about features, it's about a unified identity across everything you care about.
The pain I'm solving with Maleu: your digital life is scattered across too many apps — and none of them talk to each other.
I discovered it personally. I was using Instagram for photos, Twitter for thoughts, WhatsApp for staying connected, Strava for runs, Duolingo to learn, and a notes app for everything else. At some point I realized I felt like different versions of myself existed on different platforms.
The signal it was worth solving: every person I talked to described the same feeling without me prompting it. The word "scattered" kept coming up.
Validation approach: I didn't wait for revenue signals — I started building because I genuinely needed it. The real-world validation came from the fact that the average person uses 9+ apps daily just to live a "normal" life. That number alone felt like enough.
Has it evolved? Absolutely. What started as a feed app became a full ecosystem — communities (Circles), a learning layer (Bloom), fitness tracking (Wrex), AI photography guidance (Poses), and more. The core problem stayed the same; the solution grew to match it.
What surprised me most: people don't know they need this until you show them something unified. The "aha" moment isn't in explaining features — it's when someone sees their entire life in one place for the first time.
Building Maleu solo from Hyderabad. India's first life OS.