My ideation process

I'm building 1 project a month until 1 of them takes off.

I just started my 2nd project, so I've been deep in ideation mode. My 1st project was a powerlifting app and my 2nd project is a website to practice typing in Chinese.

These seem like really different projects right? I wanted to share my ideation process to give you all a sense of how I figure out what to work on.

Source Ideas

Generally, I try to source ideas from real problems that I personally face.

I used to get this advice a lot, but it didn't work that well for me at first. I felt like I didn't really run into many problems in my day to day life or if I did they would be way too big problems to solve.

Now this is the main advice I follow. What changed?

Do more new things

First, I do more new things now. When I got that advice originally, my life was pretty boring. I didn't really do anything except work, watch YouTube videos, eat, and occasionally workout. The main problems in my life would be with work (which is actually a great place to source ideas), but these problems were too big or too general for me to solve.

It's unbelievable how many more problems you find when you try new things. An outsider's or newcomer's perspective on a hobby, sport, activity is very valuable. If you've been doing a hobby for 5 years, you get used to the problems and accept them. If you're new to the hobby, the problems stand out.

One example is that I just got into biking recently. I've been learning so much about bike maintenance that I never really knew. I wanted to wash the gears on my bike, but I live in an apartment with no outdoor hose or drain to wash it. I went to 5 gas stations and car washes and they wouldn't let me wash my bike there. They knew that the gears get really dirty and didn't want me there even though I said I would pay them.

That's a problem I would have had no idea existed until I experienced it myself by trying this new biking hobby.

Think like an indie hacker

Second, I think about problems and solutions more now. Since taking on indie hacking full-time, building products takes up a lot of my headspace. Now any time I experience a minor inconvenience, I'll think of ways it can be solved.

While not every minor inconvenience needs a software product, it's useful to think about the opportunities and note it down. A lot of times there can be a unique solution to get software involved or if you can also build non-software businesses, even better. It keeps the idea pipeline flowing.

The real value for sourcing ideas from problems in your own life is that you are personally invested in the solution. Even if no one else uses your product, you would use it. So if all else fails, you'll be self-motivated because you want the product to exist. Obviously that's not the goal (the goal is to build a profitable business), but more likely than not, if you really want the solution to exist, others do as well.

Validate

Once you have a list of vague ideas and random indecipherable notes, it's time to validate.

To validate my ideas, I write 3 documents:

1. Product Summary
2. Business Plan
3. Competitor Analysis

Product Summary

This describes your product in detail, fleshing out the idea to an actual product. I include these:

• a "one-liner" to describe the product in as few words as possible
• a detailed product description
• the target audience
• launch/marketing channels
• feature list (marked with p0, p1, etc requirements)

This document just makes it clear what the product even is.

Business Plan

This is not formal. I write a very basic document about how I plan to monetize the product. For 1000 Pound Club, my entire business plan document was this:

Phases

1. Build MVP
2. Improve free app
3. Offer paid features/services
    1. Paid feature: show which lift is lacking compared to other users’ data
    2. Paid feature: Post video and get community feedback on form
    3. Paid service: a coaching marketplace for you to get a coach or become a coach

Free app can get 100,000 users

1% converts to premium features - $10/month (strava has 6.15%)

0.1% converts to coaching - $100/month ($500/month with 20% fee)

revenue = (1000 * 10) + (100 * 100)

revenue = $20,000 / month

I also usually look at Google Trends data and other sources to generally see how big my market is to see if my user goal is reasonable.

For me the goal here is not to create actionable steps to revenue, but to give myself a general sense of how this product could make money in the future.

Competitor Analysis

I list every website/app that could be a competitor to my product. It doesn't have to necessarily do the same thing as my product, but if a user could possibly use the other app instead of mine, I consider it a "competitor".

For example, I listed Google Sheets and pencil/paper as a competitor to 1000 Pound Club because some people track their workouts there.

I then list out where these competitors are lacking so I can figure out what gaps I can fill in this space. For TypeChinese, I noticed that very few websites focused specifically on Chinese for typing. The ones that did assumed the users were fluent in Chinese, so they didn't offer easy typing passages and didn't offer pinyin or zhuyin which is the only way a user could type a word without just knowing the character by heart.

Seeing existing products can help inspire you and show you a gap you can fill.

Build

After validating a few ideas, I choose my favorite one and get building. "Favorite" can mean a lot of things, not necessarily the one I think can be the most profitable.

For TypeChinese, a big factor is that the growth strategy is pretty different from 1000 Pound Club and I wanted to get used to different methods. For my next product, I might try a B2B product because I've been doing exclusively D2C so far.

However, when I've gotten more experience, I'll probably choose the product I think has the highest chance of success.

I'm an engineer so I'm very code-focused. Because of this, I generally build a quick prototype of the product even before designing it. This gives me a general sense of what building the product will be like and even helps me with the design.

How do you find and validate ideas for the products you work on? What has worked well for you?