Are you wasting time trying to find the perfect idea?
TLDR: Maybe you're trying too hard to think of a "brilliant instantly successful, easy to build" idea. Unpopular opinion: Build simple things that solve your own problem before you poll anyone.
How do I come up with ideas personally?
I just have a steady stream of ideas. I see something in my daily life I think I could improve for myself and I write it down to build it.
No poll. No market research. Do i get to all my ideas to build them out? Not yet. Are they all (any) good ideas? Who knows. Can I monetize the ideas? I think so, but I don't know if I can gain traction with them yet.
I'm pretty average so if I face the problem other people probably are too.
For indie hackers with a problem of "how do i come up with ideas", maybe listen to Pieter Levels (@levelsio) or @csallen talk about how they came up with theirs. Or read through ALL the IH Interviews or listen to ALL the IH podcasts. You'll learn that 90% of entrepreneurs had a problem in their life and built a solution for themselves - even an initial CRAP solution. When it solved their problem they put it out to the public and slowly found others who needed this solution too.
So what should you do?
That being said, stop trying to find the 'One Idea to Rule Them All'. You won't. Build every idea you have, no matter how insignificant you think it is. Then build another and another. This is the basic foundation of a "12x12 Challenge" (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/are-you-doing-a-12x12-challenge-you-might-be-doing-it-wrong-17bf4f998b?utm_campaign=forum-notification&utm_medium=email&utm_source=indie-hackers-emails)
This is a numbers game: build more projects because 95% of projects you do build will fail. You need to burn through those to find the one or two that will succeed.
I keep a running list of potential projects and my ideas on how to monetize. They're not all great, but I have identified ways to potentially monetize and I have recorded the ideas because they were at some point a problem I ran into and could not or did not find a solution for that fit my needs.
Again to anyone who is having trouble "coming up with an idea", I'd argue you are trying too hard to "find a billion dollar idea that will be immediately successful and easy to build". Stop this. Build small things to solve your own problems. Listen to @csallen interview 200+ founders and read the 500+ interviews on IH. Listen to podcasts that actually interview @csallen and Pieter Levels about their journeys. You'll learn a lot and you might just come up with an idea or two in the process.
Good luck. This is not rocket science, but it is damn hard to stay motivated long enough to succeed.
EDIT: Edited the Title and added a subheading
I am having doubts about 12x12 challenge, don't you need to have an audience before launchments? Maybe some of the fails are not due to a "bad idea" but to a lack of audience, or every month is used to gain audience + mvp developing?
I don't think you need an audience for a successful 12x12 challenge. You can use it to BUILD an audience I suppose. But many successful entrepreneurs didn't have an 'audience' when they built their first thing - online or offline.
Many people combine a 12x12 Challenge with building in public throughout, and that (hopefully) creates an audience invested in your success.
Will an audience HELP you gain traction with one of your projects? Maybe. At least they can help get the word out, but they might not be your target market so may not buy your thing.
Look at Pieter Levels: He didn't have an audience when he started his 12x12 blog post. But over time he built up an audience, built a tool that a niche market (wanna be nomads/backpackers) we looking for, built his audience more by doubling down on nomads, and focused on building more products/tools for that audience.
So while an audience can certainly be helpful, it is by no means a necessary piece of the 12x12 Challenge framework.
The goal of the 12x12 Challenge is to validate your ideas to find one people want to pay you for. And while an audience COULD help you with that, your perseverance and ability to get the thing in front of users will help you much much more.
True, it may be retroactive, while you build , test some side projects and learn, you will gain audience and customers too
Thanks for your answer :)
I feel perfection is myth. One has to spend considerable time to work on the idea, grow with it until maturity. Eventually you realize that you got better over time with your idea.
Most of the successful ideas a simple enough and they just stick for long enough and made it a perfect one over time.
I can definitely agree with this.
Most good ideas keep pestering you in the back of you mind until you execute on them. It's usually how you intuitively know you have an idea worth pursuing: You literally can't stop thinking about.
But you are right, many ideas need time to percolate or "boil in your head" as Pieter Levels has said. A small idea can grow into a great one if you give it enough thought.
The problem with this SOMETIMES, is spending TOO much time thinking on an idea and never executing on it (a problem I and many other wannabe indie hackers suffer from). At some point, even early on, you have to 'put up or shut up' and bring your idea out of your head and into the public.
Let others see your idea, test it out, and tell you if they think it's good or not. If it is, then double down and go at it with intensity. Otherwise, scrap it and move on to another one.
Sometimes allowing an idea to percolate for a long time can lead to doubt creeping in. You start to wonder if the idea is good enough.
100% yes. At some point you have to pull the trigger and just do the thing. It's similar to taking too long WORKING on an idea. The longer you try to build it in a vacuum, the more you want to perfect it and the less you know if your users want it.
The best thing to do is to move fast through the idea and build phase to get it out there for others to use or reject.
I too believe that building a successful product involves creation of several solutions or variations of them. Eventually you will find one that brings enough value to a market to be successful.
Billion dollar ideas might exist but you might as well reach the end of your life before finding it. It is better to start with a problem you know exists and can be solved by you.
I also agree with the process being hard. While it surely is not complicated, it truly is hard to persevere.
The only thing I don't agree with is to "just build" what comes into your mind. I am not saying you should put huge effort into validation. Simply spend a few hours for concepts and research to prioritize your ideas and start with the one that suits you best.
Although I do imply 'build all the ideas', I do agree not every idea is worth building. But my primary point is to build the ones you think have a shot and let the public tell you - by using or ignoring - if you were right, instead of 1. putting all your efforts into a doomed to fail project for too long, or 2. never even taking a chance to begin with.
But yes, you are correct: you shouldn't build EVERYTHING you come up with.
I don't think it's that hard. Just not try to force yourself to find an idea.
Look on the market, listen to what exists but is horrible executed.
Listen to the people, what do they need, and how they struggle.
We did the same when we found era.sh (a markdown note-taking tool for developers).
We saw, that there are many tools existing, but almost no tool is made for developers.
They are slow, over-bloated with features, and unintuitive. Everybody complained about that. That was our chance.
Excellent!
And yeah, that's my primary point: Stop taking so much time and effort on 'finding' an idea. THere are many opportunities out there. Find a problem and build something to solve it. It might gain traction or it might not. Either way you know and can double down or move on to the next idea.
It's not just idea and execution. Have an idea that have decent TAM and SAM that is monopoly in a niche market is challenging.
Have the only noodle shop in a busy city street is a niche monopoly that also limited too much by TAM/SAM...
What is TAM/SAM? I am not familiar with those acromnyms.
That being said, executing MVPs for your ideas is important so that you can validate or drop your ideas as quickly as possible: "Fail Fast, Fail Often", and double down on the one(s) that gain traction.
Total Addressable Market/ Serviceable Addressable Market: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/tam-sam-som
The idea here is that getting a job at megacap is 250-500k. So the business idea must have reasonable profitability relative to that 250-500k.
I'll read that article, but I think it overstates the average indie hacker's skill set/earning potential to think we could all get a job at a 'megacap earning 250-500k'.
First many of us don't want that at all. I know i don't. THe amount of stress and number of hours working for someone else I'd have to put in to earn that....no way.
Second, I've been a web dev for 13+ years and I am NOT going to be able to get a job at that range. I'm just not that good. And I'm fine with that.
But can I build some shitty little tool that could make someone's life a bit easier in some way and find a profitable niche for that tool? Yeah, I think I can and that's why 90% of us are here: We think we can turn a tidy profit buy building something that will help others in some small way.
Sure some here might think they are going to build the next 'unicorn', but 90% of those people are deluding themselves. The rest of us just want to replace our current household incomes with a side gig so we can work on what we want, when we want, and the way we want without someone else telling us what to do.
Sure we'll have clients and customers, without them we won't have profits, but we can still control our own destiny and if need be cut sh!tty clients/customers from our service.
But am i looking for 250-500k paying customers? Nope. I'm looking for 10k at best. At worst i'd settle for 1k users paying me $99 per year for a single tool or combination of tools. Anything beyond that 1k will be amazing.
YMMV
I want to give you some confidence in your abilities. By being an IH, you probably invested more of your time than most employees in mega tech.
I think if it’s for freedom and control, then being IH is a good option. If it’s monetary reasons, go to the tech companies first, make some money then do IH.
Most of the ideas I am motivated and excited to build are silly and don't have an obvious way to monetize. Figuring out how to prioritize these project ideas is also important. I guess when youre just starting out it really is just a crap shoot until you can zone in on a particular niche or development process.
I identify very much with what you say here. I have a laundry list of novel ideas. And I still struggle with prioritizing them. But that's why so many people do a 12x12 Challenge for themselves: Run through all the ideas in no particular order to burn out the bad ones and get you closer to the potentially good ones.
That being said, I also don't think people should waste time and enrgy on blatantly bad ideas. But you may never know what ones are truly bad unless you put them out to the world. Spend the month building out any one of your ideas. Build up the smallest MVP you can to show others what your idea is and see if they use it. If no one does, scrap it and move on to the next.
Hopefully you have at least one good one in there that will gain SOME traction you can double down on. Even Pieter Levels took 75 tries to get 2 or 3 profitable businesses. If he can do it so can we.
Don't you think it's better to "discover" an idea than to "think up" an idea?
How does one 'discover' an idea? Please explain?
I will give you an example. You have a new hobby that you are learning and you discover a problem that others most likely will have also, and you create a side project around that problem that you have "discovered", or you are working at a company and you discover a problem that has the potential to build a business around it. The thinking up ideas, is when you are just looking to start a side project for the sake of just starting a side project, so you are trying to think up a problem out of nowhere. Does that make sense?
But I think that i also just part of "thinking up ideas". I think you make a great point of where a good idea can come from.
My point in the post wasn't to really dictate HOW we should come up with ideas. It was about not stressing so much over coming up with a single PERFECT idea.
ome people (like @csallen) do spend time brainstorming ideas and listing pros and cons for each one they have until they 'find' one that ticks all the 'positive' boxes. Others (like you say) come up with (or 'discover') ideas in their daily life while doing things like chores, work, or hobbies. This is where I come up with most of mine.
So although I use the term 'think up', I just mean 'however you find an idea'.
Thanks for forcing me to clarify!
Also if you're tired of thinking of ideas, I have some right over here -- 3 ideas every week which will soon be 1 if you're not a premium member! Get in while the getting is good (I'll probably have a discount for current readers before I pull the switch).
Or, feel free to read the latest edition without signing up at all (for now)
Nice! I keep all my ideas on my site solomakerlife.com/startups/ and the goal is to work through them as potential MVPs / monetizable products/services
Good luck with your app!
oh interesting, I liked the following ideas:
https://solomakerlife.com/startups/hostel-wordpress-theme/
https://solomakerlife.com/startups/meditative-journaling/
https://solomakerlife.com/startups/thousand-days-to-success/
https://solomakerlife.com/startups/web-development-tutorials/
I'd do them a little differently but I love the core ideas
Thanks!
Feel free to have at it. Good luck to you too! I always share my ideas because 1. if they are trash, people will let me know :) and 2. If I never get to them, other people might be able to do them better and then i feel I've helped them along.
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Exactly. 100% agree - passion can make all the difference, but even ideas you are not passionate about can still be successful. But you have to ask yourself: If you are not passionate about it, can you see your self working on it for years? Do you WANT to work on something you are not passionate about for years. If the answer is no, even if it could be a profitable idea, maybe one shouldn't focus on it.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago