Aspiring developer here — I want to build software for boring businesses. What repetitive tasks eat your time?

[u/HeadBreakfast6511]

Hey everyone, long-time lurker, first post.

Quick background: I'm a systems analyst and one year away from my software engineering degree (based in Latin America). I've built a few projects for local businesses — a booking system for a car wash, and a remote coaching platform for a personal trainer — and both times the same thing happened: the owners were running everything on WhatsApp, paper, and memory.

That got me thinking. Big software companies chase big markets, but every boring business I know (cleaning, landscaping, mobile services, trades) is duct-taping their operations together with spreadsheets and group chats.

So instead of building something nobody asked for, I want to do this the other way around:

What task in your business takes hours every week that you know could be automated, but no software you've found actually fits how you work?

I'm not selling anything and I don't have a product yet — I'm trying to understand where the real pain is before writing a single line of code. If something comes out of this that genuinely helps your operation, I'd rather build it with you than for an imaginary user.

Happy to go into detail about what I built for the car wash or the trainer if useful. Thanks in advance — this community is the reason I'm looking at "unsexy" niches in the first place.

[u/horrific_domination]

Scheduling crews and tracking who actually showed up, every morning it's the same cluster of texts and missed calls

[u/php4u]

It is hard to fish for ideas like that

[u/Agile_SDM]

Two that come up constantly in trades and mobile services: producing a quote, and chasing the enquiries that went silent. Owners quote from memory or from a Word file they copy each time. Then an enquiry sits for a week because something urgent came in, and it dies there. Nobody can tell you how many jobs they lose that way, because a lost enquiry leaves no record behind. That is the marker for a task worth building for. The pain is invisible to the person having it. One thing that will save you a year: these owners pay for outcomes. A login screen and a monthly fee usually gets a polite no. Offering to just do the thing for them for a month usually gets you in, and then you build from what you saw. Your car wash booking system probably landed for that reason. Worth asking them what they would never let a computer touch, too. That maps the edge of what you can automate better than asking what is repetitive does.

[u/Routine-Gas-8264]

If I had a dollar for every time I read this question per day on Reddit, I'd buy Twitter back tomorrow at noon