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
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!
Started with a simple frustration: conversion tools are powerful, but their CLI UX is terrible.
I kept re-Googling FFmpeg/ImageMagick/Pandoc commands for the same tasks. Different syntax, long flags, easy to mess up. That repetition was the signal.
So I built @MCVT (Multi-format ConVerTer) - you give it an input and output, and it automatically handles the tool selection and sensible defaults.
Same tools under the hood, just no flag hell.
Still early, but the idea stayed the same: make the common path dead simple without removing power.
GitHub: https://github.com/arshalaromal/mcvt
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.
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.