Ask IH: After a year of looking for an idea, I've achieved nothing
Hello hackers,
I have a trello board, which I've started back in Jan 2017. Over that time, I've written down tons of different ideas. I've tried to evaluate and expand them.
The most depressing fact, that those ideas weren't genuine and I haven't actually started building them. For me, the main red flag was that there are tons of competitors and much better products out there. Don't get me wrong, my ideas are more advanced neither than "notepad" or "todo list", but still it's very sad I haven't started building anything.
I wonder if looking for a perfect idea might be called as a procrastination?
Any suggestions, how I can overcome it?
My trello board example: https://edvins.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/12345.jpg
One thing I don't see discussed often enough is that there is a very appealing middle ground between "pick the perfect idea upfront" and "repeatedly pivot into something entirely new." The first approach can often lead to paralysis or, just as bad, working on something you hate because it looks good on paper. The second approach resembles gambling. You want something in between.
Indie Hackers is a decent example. It started off as a small collection of interviews. That helped me build an audience via a mailing list. That mailing list helped me launch the forum and grow the podcast. The resulting traffic and downloads will help me get influencers involved so I can do even more useful and interesting things in the future. The fact that you can always build on top of your previous wins means that it's okay to start very, very small. Then keep an open mind in exploring how to move forward from there. "Parlaying, not pivoting."
I'll also echo what I said here. The fact that you're coming up with ideas that others have already done is great! It means you're coming up with good ideas, not bad ones. You just need to inject a little more novelty and creativity into that process.
In other words, you're finding surface-level good ideas that are very easy for others to discover as well. I recommend exploring a smaller surface area of ideas, but digging deeper to find the hidden gems.
A good way to do this is to add constraints. Ask yourself lots of questions, and follow up those questions with more questions. Set boundaries and limits for yourself, as well. (I've got a list of example questions and constraints in the comment I linked.) You're taking advantage of combinatorial complexity here, so a few creative questions in and you'll be digging deeper and exploring domains that nobody has ever explored before.
Of course that's not a magic bullet. Creative ideas are not necessarily good ideas. You still have to vet them. But it sounds like your rubric for doing that is pretty solid, and what you need more of is novelty.
Finally, I'll say that there are two types of creative processes. Some, like programming, involve building on top of an established based of work. You can look back at any time and say, "Hey, look what I did, that's great!" But others, like ideation or web design, involve repeatedly throwing out the bad stuff until you get to something good. Most of the time when you look back, it's easy to say, "I haven't gotten anywhere." That's why design is hard for me… I have to make 100 design decisions that suck until one doesn't. All this is to say that the feeling of frustration you're having is a totally normal one, and the rest of us feel the same often. Keep going!
Thank you!
Yes.
Pick something and JFDI! I'm serious. Flip a coin, throw darts at a board, whatever. Pick something. Commit to doing it for a minimum 6 months. It will probably fail, but you will learn a ton.
Thanks Ben for your reply.
Is there any specific reason why you suggested to do it for 6 months?
You bet! Hope it didn't seem too harsh- I'm speaking from experience ;)
6 months: long enough that you won't use "it's not working, I should fail fast" as an excuse at the first roadblock, but not so long that you'll spin your wheels needlessly if it really isn't working.
I see what you mean!
6 months!! I think that's a bit excessive, you can get a very decent MVP/MAP (a MVP should always be a Minimum Awesome Product) up in a week, I'm absolutely no expert but if you gain close to zero traction in 1 month shouldn't you just admit that this one might not work out as expected?
I think the risk, for someone new to all this, is that you'll let "fail fast" become an excuse for "give up at the first obstacle." There are always obstacles- it is easy to give up and go chase the next shiny thing. You want to commit enough to force yourself to push through, but you can go too far as well, per your point.
This is really good feedback. You are right...after years of practice and failing, "fail fast" means something very different to me now.
I'm going to be more mindful of telling other people to "fail fast" because it can easily get mis-interpreted.
Exactly, you say it yourself, that you're not an expect. Have you launched anything successful with a traction after 1 week of work? If you did then congrats to you.
Let me tell you my story, and I think 6 months is a good amount of time to have something running before deciding to take it down. It took me 2 months to build my product before I put my "MVP" in public (I was extremely slow, but still). And it was shitty, shitty UI/UX, lack of features and actually some wrong features that I killed later.
I posted to product hunt to get some traffic. Great got upvoted, got several thousand hits and a bunch of new sign ups. However that was not a success to me since I did not get a single paying customer. Even feedback I received from that group was kinda useless. So, product hunt was wrong place for me to share my product, what now? I kept building it out, tweaking and cleaning things up, and only 3 months after launch I got my first paying customer. That's a total of 5 months. Then I got another one soon after. That's 4 months of product being up in the wild + 2 months of dev time before that.
I think 6 months is a good amount of time before deciding to move on. I bet this is why people say that ideas are garbage and execution matter. I think patience is as important as execution.
Ah OK I think that is what confused me, if I would launch a product in one week and it gets a lot of exposure and a decent amount of subs I would consider that a success, apperently people want this or are at least pretty interested. If I launch and it gets some exposure but nobody who visits my page ends up using the product or being interested I would move on. In this way I have launched stuff in less than a week that was a success to me, which is providing value to people.
Having competitors is often a great thing: it means someone has already validated the market with a particular product. But entire segments of the market could still be putting up with a shitty product, for lack of an alternative. And these people can be YOUR customers.
Let me give you an example: On Capterra, 133 expense tracking products are listed: https://www.capterra.com/expense-report-software/ But not a single one of them satisfies me: a solo independent contractor who wants OCR, a mobile app, receipt forwarding by email, with IRS-approved expense categories. Not one!
And there's nothing unique about this idea. Expensify comes really close, but it's also geared towards teams and approvals in corporate environment that the interface is so annoying to use.
I'd happily pay at least $10 a month for this service, which shouldn't take longer than a couple of months to build. If there are only a 1000 other people like me, you have a $120,000 ARR product.
I think the feature list you gave would take a lot more than "a couple of months" to build.
This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make when starting a new business - if it takes all the features before the product is worth paying for, it's much harder to succeed.
What is the one feature that you absolutely need that you would pay $10/mo for NOW? If there is such a thing, then that is the product, and the rest of the feature list is the roadmap.
I get what you are trying to say, but in this particular example, I disagree.
It's literally a CRUD app, with OCR. You could probably pay for a service to do OCR.
Then what are you waiting for? If it's that easy go do it, you've got yourself a business :)
You're right. As I was writing this, I realized that perhaps I should build it :)
This comment was deleted 6 months ago.
Thanks for your advice!
Just as a side note, you should check out Veryfi. It does OCR receipts on a mobile app, gives you an email to forward receipts to, and all the categories are straight from Quickbooks. (no affiliation, just a user)
For the TL;DR, skip to that section below. For the longer story, read on:
I can relate. In many ways my experience is far worse than yours. Back in 2007 I had my first "lightbulb idea". I was super excited about it. I remember ringing Mike, a friend and fellow dev who I was working with at the time, and sharing how excited I was. Long story short, 3 months in, we'd written up some docs and started coding, then found that "it had already been done" and immediately threw in the towel.
There were a lot of things wrong with how we did things:
We picked a big idea, and...
Let it grow and grow whilst working on it, making the end further and further away, gradually crippling our motivation. Hello feature creep.
We were put off by the mere fact someone else had done it. Our motivation was to be first, to be seen as innovators.
Simply put, we tried to run a marathon when we'd never even hit the road.
For the next 7 years, we repeated the same mistake over and over. A new shiny idea would appear, we'd scope out all the amazing features it would have, start work, dream some more, grow it some more, build some more until we'd grown a behemoth that we knew we could never slay. This was so regular we eventually called it "The Never Ending Project Cycle of Doom" (https://learningtolaunch.co/assets/img/cycle_of_doom.png).
After failing over and over, Mike realised the issue wasn't the ideas, it was us. So we parked our ego and lofty ambitions at the door, and designed ourselves a bootcamp. For the next six months we'd launch one project a month. No matter what we'd ship, learn and move on.
Those six months were by far the most rapid growth in my entrepreneurial and professional life. I landed my first professional job as a developer, met a bunch of interesting people and levelled up our side project skills multiple times.
After launching project number six, we decided to write a short, free, no email required book about our experience. You can read it online here: https://learningtolaunch.co/
TL;DR:
Start small — pick a really small idea, and then pick the smallest possible scope for that. We thought we'd done this with our first project, howsitgo.in, but 250 hours invested later, 3 weeks overdue, we realised we'd started way too big. Remember you're not trying to create your legacy now, just trying to level up and learn.
Set a deadline — if you've never launched before, you should force yourself to ship within 4-6 weeks maximum. Any more than this and you risk leaving the honeymoon phase and your project dying a slow death. There's nothing like launching for motivation.
Force yourself to be accountable — Tell people what you're working on and when you're going to launch. Join communities like https://WIP.chat by Marc Kohlbrugge & Bootslackers by Clifford Oravec (https://twitter.com/cliffordoravec/status/861321326719578113). Basically, don't go it alone.
(optional) Share your journey — the more you share, the more interesting you are, the more interesting people you'll attract, the more opportunities you'll have.
There's more I could say, but doing just these 3/4 should be all you need. Any questions feel free to ask here or ping me on twitter (https://twitter.com/FredRivett).
I wish I could upvote this 100 times. Well said.
Thanks Mikel :)
Thank you Fred for your answer.
Yeah, I follow you in twitter for years, will hit contact you if I have any further questions 🙏
Great, be sure to do so, happy to help how I can.
Great response and resource. Thanks!
Cheers Josh 🙌
Hi Edvins, I tried clicking on the link and didn't realize, until I tried reloading it a few times, that the lists were redacted. :D I was hoping to help you pick out an idea there and just throw it back at you.
Anyway, I think if you come from a developer background -- and it looks like you do -- you're practically 50% there. You don't need to spend the money or resources (other than time) to pursue an idea -- no matter which idea it is.
Don't worry about competitors. Find a niche and go at it. Set a timeline to build the thing in 2 weeks or so, and launch it. Soon enough, you'll know whether there's a business or not.
I'm less inclined nowadays to set up landing pages when, similar to you, I'm able to (whether via employees or having the skills) quickly prototype something and start selling.
The concept of ideas being cheap and the best ideas are often the hardest to sell is hard to accept until you have a few shipped products under your belt or even pitched a lot
Agreed. Can't be overstated.
I think quick prototyping is actually a hard skill to learn. Especially if you've worked mostly in big tech companies, you're used to having lots of time and also lots of pressure to ship something "fully baked."
When you're testing out a business, I think it's important to ship something that's embarrassingly bad and nowhere near ready and see what people say. Sometimes it really is too soon and you need to work more before you can sell it. But sometimes, if people have a real problem and your tool really does help, you'll be SHOCKED when the crappy thing you put together with string and bubble gum is worth $10 to someone else.
Having that experience just once is enough to totally change the way you feel about building software, and what it means for something to be "ready" versus what it means for it to be "done."
Yeah I agree. Building fast is akin to shot gun style development. I have, however, found that the more one practices it, the end product ends up surprisingly polished simply because more code can be reused from prior projects. Copy and paste to the rescue.
I agree with this. I've been able to push out quite well done projects in a month by being able to reuse large portions of code from prior projects. Once you build some things like customer/team management, billing, etc you can mostly copy paste into a new project and hit the ground running.
That said, keeping it limited more to an MVP vs a fully polished project is something that I still struggle with.
Hi Edvins,
Yeah that's procrastination, but it's normal! One thing you'll hear in this community is that "ideas are cheap." You kind of have to build a product or two before you'll understand this, but trust me, it's true. Everything is a lot harder to build than you think it is, and once you've experienced that then you'll hear somebody say "All I want is an app that ____" and you'll laugh because you'll know that's really five years of work to deliver.
If you really want to build something but you don't know what, the best thing is to pick a problem you personally care about and jump in and build something to solve it.
That may or may not turn out to be a viable product. If you listen to the advice here and think "lean startup" you can probably figure out whether or not it's viable in a few weeks or months instead of years.
But, honestly, you're not learning if you're not trying, so it would be better to "waste" a year working hard on a bad idea and learning all the hard lessons you need to learn than it would be to actually waste a year just thinking about doing stuff but not jumping in and doing anything.
Life is short, you'll never have a guarantee of success. But on the other hand, every day you don't try is guaranteed not to succeed :)
Cheers!
“Action is the antidote to despair.” - Joan Baez
You've already identified the main problem: "those ideas weren't genuine." It usually takes years of hard work to build a product that will last.
If you aren't genuinely interested in building something, maintaining it, supporting it, and iterating on it for years to come, don't even start working on it. You will burn out long before your product becomes self sustaining.
So how do you find an idea that is genuine? If you have an area of domain expertise (like finance, medicine, law, education) zero in on some very specific problem in that field that you care about. If you don't, just go get a job in an industry for a year, and you'll immediately see all kinds of problems that need solving.
As for not having built anything, just keep going to hackathons and building throw-away products. This will not only help you improve your skills and build your network - it will also help you divorce your ego from these products. You'll begin to see the underlying permutations these solutions take on, and how you can recombine them into something new and useful.
My advice would be to stop thinking of ideas and instead start studying the activities people do. What tools are they using, is their new tech that changes how people do things, what problems do they have, is new tech causing new problems in said activity, are there opportunities to improve an activity, etc...
When thinking of only ideas, it's unstructured and mostly about luck. I've also found an idea focused mindset can be overly romantic and divorced of reality. Looking at the world through an activity centered lens was a game changer for me.
What if instead of a trello board of ideas, you had a trello board of human activities and opportunities and problems in each. Then it'd be about testing which activities you could help people do better and that you're excited about.
Here's a few resources:
https://theblog.adobe.com/putting-people-first-tips-and-advice-from-ux-pioneer-don-norman/?trackingid=N3PCRXY3&mv=email
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/activity-theory
https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/stop-designing-users
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/logic_versus_usage_the_case_for_activity-centered_design.html
Hi Edvins - I dealt with the same feeling. Last Janurary. I said I would complete 12 projects in 12 months. By the end of the year. Guess how many projects were completed? None :( After feeling embarrassed after making such a bold statement. I started listening to and hanging around people who get things done. After I focused more one my mindset, skill set, and network things are starting to change.
I think you are doing a great job by being apart of this community and having a very public personal blog. Execution comes down to focus. Keep up the great work and keep us indie hackers updated.
What were the main things that you learned from people who are getting things done?
Makers who get things done ship constantly and don't make excuses. They also create tight feedback loops within their product or community of fans or users. I think a good example of this wip.chip by marc.
Share your unblurred idea board so that we can give you some recommendations if we see any patterns.
Ideas don't have much value at all. Most business is boring ideas. Execution is everything: determination/drive, team, capital, time, connections, partnerships, technology, speed, etc.
Ask what you want to accomplish for yourself and figure out what it takes. Are you trying to change the world, revolutionize a particular industry, and all this other VC-driven stuff? Most people dream of things like that but most are realists and just want to improve their lives by taking a step or two up. Financial independence, not having a bad boss, flexibility to be a parent, etc. For that, VC advice is your enemy. You won't need a novel idea, you won't need to revolutionize the world, take over an industry, and so on. You'll just need to provide a service for at least a handful of customers.
Look up Amy Hoy's 30x500 formula: $30/month multiplied by 500 customers, equals a good income for one person!
Stop listening to the VC-driven startup world that you have to have a new and awesome idea. This world runs on competition, so just go do it!
And just to show you how little I think ideas are worth, here's an awesome idea I had a few hours ago:
SaaS service that diffs the structure of data files you feed in programmatically (json, xml, html, csv) and alerts you when they change.
A lot of internet businesses involve processing data from third-parties. You write the code to automate it, and let it run. You become dependent on it. The company on the other end changes the format a few months down the line, and now your code doesn't work anymore. You might not even notice right away! Yes, you can go debug it once you do notice, but you're stressed to just fix it as quickly as possible. Wouldn't it be nice if you could log into diff-my-data.com and it simply shows you the structural changes in your json or xml files? Or it tells you that what used to be a field with only positive numbers now sometimes has negative values?
Want to make easy money off that? Sell it to affiliate marketers. They're a straight and simple revenue-cost-profit business and it's easy to sell to such people. Most changes directly affect profits. They automate their reporting to pull in their ad spend, revenue numbers, and more, and try to figure out which corners of the internet, keywords, or concepts are working out and which aren't. Many of the partner websites they use are crappy and changes happen all the time. Sometimes, their reporting involves crunching data from html files, and those break all the time!
I've felt the need for such a product, but I'm busy with the things I'm currently working on. So there, I put my idea out there because execution is king!
Fun fact is that it's still possible to read lot's of them even with the blur
It just means that you still didn't find your idea. Keep searching. Trust me when you find it you will feel that you must start it right now.
I completely agree with this. When I first had the idea that turned into my current business, I stopped everything I was doing and immediately started coding. It was something that I felt I just couldn't not pursue.
I'll echo what a lot of others have said, just picks something and do it. I've tried and failed at a lot of SaaS ideas over the past few years but I've learned something from each one. If you are a developer, the experience you will get by trying to market your project will be invaluable in its own right, even if it ultimately fails.
And as others have said, competition is a good thing. If you have a totally new idea, marketing it is extra hard because you probably don't even really know where to find the people to market to.
Why not try the ideas under 'interesting' or 'refined'? Having competition in a space is good since someone has already validated the market. imo with the small overhead of indie hacking vs angel / vc funded startup - there's a lot more room to mess up since it costs so little to ship online apps compared to brick & mortar businesses
As many stated already. Pick one, set a deadline (I'd recommend < 1 month), ship.
You could even throw 2-3 ideas out here for voting by the Community.
If you need somebody to hold you accountable you can ask and find somebody too.
Take action and good luck!
Release something. Even if it is a stupid idea. Pick a product that you can complete in let's say a week, then release it to a wide public. Most people fail on planning stage because of fear to release and judgement of users. If you will release first thing, it will be much easier from there. Do not overcomplicate and perfect it, just put something together and release it. If you will find yourself still tinkering it after 1 month, then you will fail.
Set a failure on missing delivery date, not on releasing not perfected, possibly buggy tool.
Yes
Execute.
OR
Either way, execute, get experience, get money to survive. The idea will come.
@ummahusla do not give up! Pick something you are interested in an build the MVP. Launch it, scale, and learn from the experience. If it doesn't work out, rinse, and repeat.
I don't know why you'd bother masking the ideas. If anyone wanted to work on them, they'd be doing it already.
What else are you doing Edvins? Have you a job? Student?
What do you do everyday? Build something based on that.
We spent 5 years working on old headstones and then built something for cremations.
Doing is a habit triggered (turn on the kettle, do 100 pushups). Thinking isn't doing. We spend too much time thinking.
Think less. Do more.
I'm a lead front-end developer working for a big energy company. I have a family and recently I became a father.
Good point, but it's really hard to achieve.
I was just listening yesterday to Peter Thiel's talk with James Altucher, from 2014, when he launched "Zero to One", and he also talks about competition and how many people give up because they look too much at others. I think this will help you: https://jamesaltucher.com/2014/09/peter-thiel/
This book is actually on my bookshelf, I still haven't managed to find the time to read it..
Perhaps you should start with their talk and decide afterwards if you want to dig more into the subject or not :)
And you can also just read Derek Sivers' book notes from here (I also use them to decide if a book is right for me): https://sivers.org/book/ZeroToOne
I suggest that instead of just "coming up" with ideas, you use a more deliberate approach. Here are some questions/checklist I devised (on another forum):
(Choose a skill, knowledge to seed your idea search)
(Choose an audience you can serve with your talents)
What needs (problems, obstacles, desires) does that audience have?
What needs do they pay to resolve?
What solutions do I have the skill, knowledge, interest to solve?
Solutions = ideas.
By identifying your talents (skills, knowledge, interests) you're bounding your possibilities to something you're capable of executing.
By matching your talents with an audience your familiar with (belong to, relate to), audience research is minimized (you kinda know what to look for).
By identifying the needs they have and pay for, you validate. (If competing solutions were sufficient, you may not have identified it...there's still something missing, unresolved).
By identifying the ones you can solve, you execute.
I suspect this process will help with procrastination. If done with vigor, you're going to reduce uncertainty which should help while also centering your efforts on developing "perfect ideas" that you can take action on.
I agree with what others have said, just pick something and build it. The chances of it being as successful as you hope is pretty slim, so just build something, launch it and keep track of things that went well, what went wrong and what you would do better next time.
Then build your second project, track the good and the bad and learn from it.
Then go back to your first project and re-evaluate it, rebuild it, refresh it and relaunch it.
Rinse and repeat.
Also, pick one key feature and focus on that and do it as good as possible. Only other features are standard things like login/register/lost password, etc.
If it takes you more than 2 months to build, it's probably too big.
Ideas are great but if they only ever stay ideas then what's the point? Just build it!
Why let competition mess you up that badly that you don't even try? Learn to become a dangerous competitor and everything opens up to you.
Hi Edvin,
I think you'll have an easier time finding an idea by looking for a problem that needs solving/shrinking.
You could also ask around and make a list of the things/services that suck the most.
I follow the below steps when researching ideas:
Don't attempt to invent the world.
Look to solve an existing problem.
Competition is healthy.
If you find someone already selling an idea don't ditch it, embrace it, look to improve on the product/service and outsell your competition.
Look for holes and exploit them!
If by "perfect idea" you mean overnight success idea, then yes.
Otherwise no. I believe like Sam Altman does, if you're going to put in 3-5 years of your life into a startup, then it makes sense to put in a year or two searching for it. It's a pretty gray area as to when it's procrastination or not as you can't really know if something will succeed or not until you try.
Imo the trick is to build something for yourself, if you do that, then who cares if there are competitors.
As people said, having competition is good. And in a lot of interviews people have said to act, so it's better to stop refining idea and create something. Even small is better than having something in your mind.
Also, you'll have an opportunity to practice your skill. You'll feel better even if it's a failure.
Well thats not necessary a red flag. You just have to be different ;)
For example there are a ton of project management tools and saas solutions out there.
In my current company we tried a lot of them. But still did not find the "perfect one" that fits our workflow / requirements.
Currently running jira, but quite unhappy with it.
---
Take for example Slack. Slack is nothing "new". They had (Atlassians) HipChat as a compeditor. Which until recently still got way better features. However Slack did good marketing and offered imo one really killer feature which boosted them. Multi-Team support.
Or Sketch. I mean who would fight against Adobe with their huuuge flagships Illustrator and Photoshop ? But Sketch was unqiue und different enough to success.
---
Choosing the right idea is hard. However from my experience the best idea is that one, that one, that solves your problems. If you just try to solve someone else's problem, you mostly will fail. Because of missing requirements and in the end also missing motivation. So find something that you would personally benefit from and build it. Validate it and turn it into a product.
Pick one idea you like enough, think about how you'll feel when it's done, and set yourself a (relatively aggressive) deadline: finish MVP within 3 weeks.
Regarding competition, its important to realize what kind of idea you have. Some companies are built around a core idea that is easy to replicate and with a limited market, so you have to quickly expand and capture 90% of the market. Its hard to fight the incumbents there. This is the mentality around a lot of startups.
On the other hand there are markets that are contested but there is always room for new players. Project Management tools, Todo apps etc, games etc almost have an infinite market. You dont need to be a behemoth in this space to carve some value for yourself.
Don't fret the competition
Don't let the 'scooped' feeling dissuade you for two reasons:
Big markets can support many solutions to the same problem and still make good money and be worthwhile.
Contact with the market will show you 'holes' that you couldn't have imagined and often that's where the killer ideas are.
Just start and try to have fun with it.
Step 1: Idea / Validate
Step 2: Build It
Step 3: Market It
Depending on discipline, skill, and luck, you might have to repeat this cycle a few times. Nothing is guaranteed, just willingness to try.
I see them as a natural problem to be solved. Before Google there is Yahoo, before Facebook there is MySpace, etc. You can focus on a niche (Notepad for Songwriter), or just go ahead as you would learn a lot more about the product and industry than before (and maybe discover new opportunity or idea).
Yup, no perfect idea, just ideas we are willing to try.
Pick an idea and do it. Of course you might face other problems like focus and procrastination, by then you can post another question asking for help :)
Ready for Step 2?