<story><title>How HackerNews ruined my morning</title><url>http://swanson.github.com/blog/2011/02/22/how-hackernews-ruined-my-morning.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edw519</author><text>Here&apos;s an idea: find &lt;i&gt;someone else&lt;/i&gt; with a problem and work on that.  This works especially well if the someone else is in business, very busy, and has some money.  Chances are better that your solution to their problem won&apos;t have much competition: if it did, they would have already gone with it.&lt;p&gt;I know this is the opposite of &quot;scratch your own itch&quot;, but I always found that advice overrated.  I have always been much more successful scratching other people&apos;s itches.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>1000x this. The Internet doesn&apos;t mean every idea you have will be built by 10 other people first; it means that every idea you have that serves 20-something geeks will be built by 10 other people first. Build for other people. Added bonus: other people tend to actually spend money for solutions to their problems.</text></comment>
<story><title>How HackerNews ruined my morning</title><url>http://swanson.github.com/blog/2011/02/22/how-hackernews-ruined-my-morning.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edw519</author><text>Here&apos;s an idea: find &lt;i&gt;someone else&lt;/i&gt; with a problem and work on that.  This works especially well if the someone else is in business, very busy, and has some money.  Chances are better that your solution to their problem won&apos;t have much competition: if it did, they would have already gone with it.&lt;p&gt;I know this is the opposite of &quot;scratch your own itch&quot;, but I always found that advice overrated.  I have always been much more successful scratching other people&apos;s itches.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swanson</author><text>I think that approach would work better for a startup company, but for a side project, it doesn&apos;t seem that feasible.&lt;p&gt;It is good advice, but when I want something to hack on in the evening or on the weekends, setting up a business meeting isn&apos;t exactly crossing my mind.&lt;p&gt;I work on other peoples problems at the day job so it&apos;s nice to have a break :)</text></comment>