The question I was answering was: "How do you guys network with the right business people to speak their language and find out how their processes work?"

I don't think "just ask" is misleading at all. The fact that most people will happily complain about their business processes but won't have ideas to solve them doesn't make it "tricky", it makes it an opportunity.

There might be fields of endeavor where identifying solvable problems is incredibly hard, maybe in academia or politics, but business processes? Execution and, if you want to get rich, scaling up are hard. But identifying solvable problems with people's business processes is totally one of the "easiest [things] in the world".

See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html