The way to think of startup ideas is not to think of startup ideas but rather to look for problems. So says Paul Graham. If you can provide a focused solution to a high-pain problem shared by many, then you have yourself a business.

For example, Stripe does that for the many websites that want to accept credit card payments without the hassle of merchant accounts or PCI compliance. Papertrail does that for sites who want to be able to make sense of application server log statements and exceptions. Crashlytics filled a critical need for mobile developers who otherwise had limited view of how their apps fared in the hands of actual users.

A friend of mine was reading a book called ObamaCare Survival Guide and had all but given up trying to understand ObamaCare compliance. The trouble is that there are lots of small businesses out there who don’t have that luxury. Think restaurants. Think small contracting firms. The owners of these companies are busy people who now have many new rules to follow, and those rules are complex and differ state-to-state and sometimes by city (eg San Francisco’s Health Care Security Ordinance). Oh yeah, and expect that those rules will be changed by Congress at some point.

So, create a service that handles everything small businesses need to comply with employee healthcare laws. As a user, I would want to be able to enter in my business address and info about my employees, and this service would take care of the rest down to recordkeeping and sending payments and forms where they need to go.

This one’s for free, along with the zero hard research that’s gone into it. In fact, from now on, whenever you hear about a survival guide for anything, just assume that there is a business idea.