I have noticed that a lot of interesting opportunities are hiding behind solving a problem that is
painful to work around. It could be a source of interesting ideas for a project, product, or
startup.
This is a list of various painful problems. The solutions are from past and present. Ellipsis "..."
indicates potential opportunity.
- Version control pains in 2000s -> Git.
- Git is cool, but painful -> GitHub.
- Maintaining servers is painful -> AWS.
- AWS is painful -> Aiven, Vercel, Fly, ...
- Making complex frontend apps is painful -> React approach.
- Debugging CI is a pain -> ...
- Payments are painful -> Stripe.
- File sharing is painful -> Dropbox.
- Email clients are painful -> Gmail.
- Configuring developer laptop is a pain -> ...
- Writing same CRUD API over and over again is painful -> Firebase, GraphQL, ...
- Caching is painful - Materialize.com, ...
- Waiting for build, test and deploy is painful -> Darklang?, ...
- Concurrent programming is extremely painful -> Trio, ...
- Buying stuff online is painful -> ...
- Making websites is painful -> Squarespace, Shopify, Webflow, ...
- Deploying even simple sites is painful -> Netlify, Vercel, CloudFlare Pages.
- Administering your and your friends computers is painful -> smartphones, tablets, ChromeOS.
- Watching kids stare at smartphones is painful -> ...
- Dealing with backend secrets is painful -> ...
- Making admin UI is painful -> Django Admin, retool.com. The latter is awesome. It took me an
hour to make a functional admin UI with it.
- Implementing pixel-perfect frontends while looking at Figma is painful -> ...
- Migrating WhatsApp from Android to iOS is painful -> ...
- Losing your data (e.g. WhatsApp, Facebook, random notes etc.) is painful -> Perkeep?
- Losing your photos is painful -> Google Photos, ...
- Browser is slow, especially with lot's of tabs open -> Brave (built-in ad blocker), Mighty, ...
- Taxes are painful -> ...
- Invoices are painful -> ...
- Getting movies is painful -> Netflix.
- Getting music is painful -> Apple iTunes, Spotify.
- Typos while coding are painful -> typed languages.
- XML is painful -> JSON.
- YAML is painful -> ...
- Dealing with my group sports activities finances is painful -> ...
- Talking to people through shitty cameras and microphones is painful -> ...
- Doing everything in your life via glass rectangles is painful -> ...
- Starting a blog is painful -> Wordpress, Medium, Substack, ...
- Learning to write well is painful -> ...
- VPN is painful -> Tailscale.
- Passwords are painful -> 1Password, Passkeys, ...
- Life is painful -> religion?
- Finding things on the internet is painful -> Google.
- Finding relevant things with Google is painful (e.g. while shopping) -> ...
- Python virtualenv and pip are painful -> Poetry, Rye, ...