How to discover a market, a niche, a real problem to solve?
What one needs to do is to DISCOVER a market, a niche, a problem to solve. As opposed to coming up with product ideas. Ideas are nice and most of us have plenty of them. Even great visions. But they make sense only as much as trying to walk on a head.
What is your process for discovering problems to solve? Is there perhaps any website dedicated to precisely that?
I know the usual advice - identify some problems in your life or work etc. But I currently don't see any problems close to me which would constitute an interesting market. How'd you go about reaching out to problem spaces outside your comfy zone?
I always try to understand how the economy, businesses and the world around me work... I try to understand the business models and machines around products I use / see / discover. And in everyday life there are plenty of opportunities to think trough a business model.
Then I might find one of the niches / markets interesting enough to do some research or talk to people within there...
Example 1: Getting breakfast at my local bakery
There is a line in front of the bakery, whereas a few 100m down the road, another bakery where no one is waiting. Whats the difference? Branding, Marketing, Quality? How did they manage to outsmart their competition? Would I want to help the successful one to grow even more or would I want to help the smaller one have a little chance? What could they improve? Am I interested in bread and marketing?
How do the successful one manage their supply chain of fresh bread? Where is it baked? Who drives it to the stores? How do they manage their stores? Franchise? Who in this whole chain might have a burning problem to solve? Do I know anybody within? Is there a similar industry I know well (rocket science, transportation, event organization, construction) which could have innovations / processes which could be applied here too?
Example 2: Getting married
While looking for a location to celebrate I noticed that most (if not all of them) are booked a year in advance, so they have absolutely ZERO need to do marketing, beeing listed in some online directory, etc. etc. -- they might have a great busuiness at their hands (due to a overflow of incoming leads) but probably they have other problems which you could solve. Just thinking about the staff organization, the lead qualification, the booking, etc. etc. They sure as hell have some "big ass burining pain" which buggs them. Just
Example 3:
Having a construction site in front of my window
How do they manage to have the right materials here on time? Who does manage that? How does the landlord decide what companies to hire? How does he compare prices? How does the company who does the scaffolding manage when to accept a new contract or to buy new scaffolding frames? How do they hire / manage their team? How come on some days the whole site is empty, nobody working at anything at all? Is that intentional or an accident? Who is earning the most money with such a construction project? Who is earning the least? Why? Why does it take so long to build when every month earlier is $-rent in the bank of the landlord?
... Just to name a few of the last days
Whatever you come up with:
Oh, and I found that you stumble into a lot more opportunities if you are already doing something. So if you are already building / running a business you see and are confronted with dozens of other potential business nices.
It might be similar to dating, right - if you are sitting alone on the couch there is zero chance you are meeting anybody interesting. But if you are out there doing stuff (sport, work, shopping, leisuring, walking dogs, whatever, etc.) the chances to have ANY social interaction rise...
Good luck!
Whenever you meet someone - jump right into it!
It looks like this:
And boom. You’ve just kicked off a problem focused interview.
Lol. I usually walk away when strangers immediately want to dig into conversations about work in a social setting.
I'm not saying this method couldn't have its benefits but there would be a cost!
OP forgot the crucial step during questioning - you need to get your pencil and notebook out of your pockets to write down the answers and look legit.
Well, I suppose. There's probably a few questions in between 3 and 4 just as conversation flows - but once you have a convo going it's a question that always gets people thinking. Assuming the conversations flowing naturally I've found it to open up some fun dialog - or even opportunities to help them with some of the tech things you know that they don't.
You can try spending some time on watering holes where your audience hang out. You'll see lots of problems. For example, if want to build something for Shopify, you can look at
Shopify Discussion forums.
Alternatively, you can look at job listing in upwork and see if there a recurring problem that you can fix. The good thing about this method is that there are people willing to have their problem solved.
I disagree that far out there visions do not make any sense ... they are just not low hanging fruit, and indies should really know what they are getting into when they go for it. There is enough tyrannical order (where people have carried the ashes into the present rather than the fire) that is ripe for disruption that I think people should never reject crazy ideas right way.
I like to think about opportunities in terms of improving managerial leverage though modernization. High Output Management is the book that I keep going back to for that.
Basically, business is about building pipelines where other people are carrying buckets - or in other words, about longer levers.
Pick any industry that is validated (there is a multi-billion dollar market around it), then investigate what the industry standard is when working in that area (look at its niches at this point). Then, do thought experiments: what would be the ideal way to work on something - with maximum managerial leverage - in that industry and niche?
Of course, it is pretty difficult to improve things in mature industries because people have optimized managerial leverage for quite a while.
Interestingly that makes the seemingly hardest markets (technology related, where everything is in flux) the most interesting ones to look at.
I always think around "aggregation" ... i.e bringing together buyers, sellers, users or creating a marketplace. Thoughts?
Kevin Kelly would agree in his book "The Inevitable".
He sees obvious business opportunities in the 12 forces that he mentions there and predicts that we will look back at them the way we look back at the "obvious" ways to make money in the eary days of the internet. Cognifying tools is another one he mentions very explicitly.
Personal experience is so important.
When you feel the pain point you are trying to solve, you'll have better idea of the what product needs to do.
I think the best way is to engage with the world and pay attention. When you explicitly look for business ideas, it's dangerous because they'll all sound reasonable but often be slightly off.
If you notice things are broken in some way as you pursue your hobbies, or your friends complain about issues, those are probably more genuine needs to be fixed. The real trick is to pay attention rather than dismiss them. The early IH podcast on Instapainting was really good about explaining this strategy.
Scan through the following lists of occupations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_occupations
From "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup".
Solving a problem, even one that desperately needs solving, is not the same as finding a market. Sometimes, finding a market means creating the problem where it didn't even exist before (e.g. the deodorant market -- people were fine with how they smelled before they were shamed into it).
Don't think of it in terms of problems to be solved; think of it in terms of what do people pay money for. My advice is to look for things where you either understand completely why someone pays money for it, or where you don't understand at all. If you don't understand at all, investigate until you understand completely.
Everything else, you will have some kind of mediocre understanding, and that is the most dangerous kind of understanding to have -- to think you know the market when you really don't.
If you truly understand the market, no matter how badly you screw up the rest of your business, you will know what to do to correct it.
Anything that separates you from your goal for longer than an instant is, by all modern accounts, a problem in need of a solution.
This is a very nice, condensed-in-its-gist observation! :)
I usually "observe", for example when I hang out with friends we usually share our experiences (ie things that happened yesterday, last week etc), and here you can find a lot of inspiration! They can be triggers for ideas or solutions to a problem that you did not face directly.
Otherwise, I find forums like this one or reddit etc really inspiring, not because people give you problems to solve! Instead you can come up with cool ideas out of the blue by simply reading someone else's story!
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
Interesting, thanks :)