A good product solves a problem. Try to find problems and you’ll end up with tons of ideas.
Ideas can be found or can strike you in four ways 👇🏻
1. Personal faced by you or your friends and family
- This is the easiest and perhaps the most effective method. Look for problems that you face in your day-to-day life or try to observe the problems faced by your friends or family. But remember, not all problems are hare in the fire problems – meaning people might not pay for a solution if it is something they can live with.
- ⚡️Fed built Gummysearch to solve his personal problem of finding reddit keyowrds related to his other project – the hive index
2. Epiphenies
- They say that ideas can strike you anywhere and rightly so, they can. You observe something that gets stored in your subconscious mind and a trigger finally leads you to an idea. A lot of times, these kinds of ideas may be solutions looking for problems – Avoid such ideas.
- ⚡️ We (Wahab & I) built AI Pick Up Lines in December ‘23 when GPT-3 had just launched a better model and I texted Wahab that we could build a pick up lines generator using it. I dont know where that idea came from but it was a random text. Next morning we built it out and launched it. It sort of went viral – got us good traffic and we ended up selling it for a decent amount of money given the effort. I categorise AI Pick Up Lines as one of my epiphenistic products.
3. Inspirations
- You can take inspiration from a product and try to build a better version or a similar product for a different niche or domain. The good part about such ideas is that these are validated (as demonstrated by a successful product) but the bad part is that you might have to work extra hard to move customers from existing solutions.
- ⚡️Danny Postma built HeadshotsPro after getting inspired from Pieter Levels’ AvatarAI.me (Now PhotoAI). Danny even publicly replied on Pieter’s tweets when he was about to start his product.
- The important point here is that you shouldn’t clone someone’s products but try to build a different/better or your version of product.
4. Deep Domain Problems
- These are the best. When you have deep domain expertise or when you have worked in a domain pretty closely, you likely know the issues in the value chain of that domain/industry/sector. Such problems may be a little difficult to solve but often result in great outcomes, if done right.
- ⚡️We built visualizeAI – a visualisation tool for Interior designers when I was overlooking the construction of our new home and discussed the problem of interior design visualization with Rushab, who is an architect by training. A few weeks later when we were playing around with ControlNet, it struck rushab that we could solve the problem using ControlNet (an AI model) and we built out VisualizeAI. You could feed in a sketch and it would generate great visualizations from it. In three months time, we did a decent amount of revenue and eventually sold it for $30K.
How to find Problems?
- What irritates you on day to day basis? Look for some pain points that you personally experience a lot of time, this is the best way to start as you already got the first user as it is popularly said “Solve your own Itch”
- Observe your friends Talk to your friends, don’t ask them the problem they are facing but ask them about their day-to-day work and life, and once they start explaining ask deeper questions about particular frictions but avoid asking leading questions. Doing this often will definitely help to find some interesting problems to solve
- Try to look for trends on Twitter/Reddit Listen to Conversations on Reddit/Twitter, you will find people asking a lot of similar questions and discussing similar pain points everyday Reddit threads can be a goldmine of ideas – especially look at the comments and see if you can find the problem statement.
- Check out Reviews on G2 Look for Reviews on G2 and Capterra – See what users are talking in reviews particular in bad reviews, validate by searching if the same issue is mentioned in other reviews. If you find one, congratulations, you have a problem with paying users already you can reach out to.
- Look for Inspirations on App Store/Play Store/Product Hunt There are millions of products on the Play Store/App Store. 100s of products launch on Product Hunt on a daily basis – just spend time on these platforms and you will build your own patterns to find ideas or insights.
- Deep Domain Analysis A more specific approach will be Identifying industry you are excited about and want to solve for, doing all the mentioned steps above for people and communities around those industries