Finding pain points

Speak to people, ask them what their pain points are

What you are asking about is essentially the design thinking process. However, to summarize your first ask about pain points - Assuming you have a topic area in mind that you are interested in: 1. start by looking for existing solutions of any kind in the topic area. 2. then as the previous person recommended - do some research - both secondary ( online search, books, articles) and primary ( talking to users of the current solutions and experts in the field). 3. The users you should pick should include extreme on the spectrum of users like if you are trying to do something in ground transportation - you may talk to someone who gets chaufered in a limo and someone who can only walk around or take a bus. 3. You are trying to understand both the needs of these people using the current solution and why the current solution doesn't work - these can be broken down into three categories of needs - explicit - where the problem and solution is clearly articulated, Tacit - where the problem is articulated in a round about way and latent needs - where after talking to people you can see some patterns of a problem that no one person could articulate. Hopefully now you should have a sense for the space and the types of problems people face in the area

Speaking to people by itself is less valuable than identifying an insight and then validating it with people. Observe the pain points in your life. What are the areas that you wish you could save time (convenience, efficiency) or $$ (value), or both. If you were uber, you were frustrated with getting a taxi when you needed it. They were expensive, took a lot of time, not guaranteed, didn’t care about service and were unreliable. So whats the alternative? Public transportation. That’s not viable. On the other hand private cars are idling, and many owners need a way to make $$. You match commuters to drivers willing to transport them. But you are greedy and don’t have a conscience. So you call them contractors, take away 25% of their earnings, and do not offer health, legal assistance with tickets, cars, any compensation for wear and tear (esp. to your full time drivers), simply call them contractors and essentially tell them to screw themselves. So now the insight is that drivers hate Uber, only 4% stay on after a year. So Lyft offers these hapless souls a shade better than slave labor, tips, and expects them to work the same model as restaurant servers. GM recognizes the pain point and decides to launch Maven, for GM car owners to make $$ by offering AirBnB for cars. Waze bought by google wants in on the action, esp. since a lot of silly conned suckers drive across 101 or 280 and cannot use the carpool lane. So they offer a warm body to drivers to use car pool lane and offer 10 bucks for gas, keeping a nice chunk of change for themselves. All this while Waymo realizes that people suck. The pain point is people. So they test level 4 autonomous cars and get a commercial license to drive automated taxis in California. Replacing that driver who was taking one paying seat and asking for money, for a job that a machine can do with a couple sips of coal fed electrons.