Getting better at coming up with successful ideas this 2020

I have never felt that I was particularly good at coming up with good ideas, but after much trial and error through the years, I feel like I've become much better at it.

Here are a few tips that hopefully can help some folks come up with ideas in the new year :)

If your idea has already been built, it means it was a good idea

Imagine this, you are struggling to come up with a unique idea, something to build, days go by and you finally get your eureka moment, you think your idea is amazing and unique, you go onto Product Hunt and Google only to discover that your idea has been done or is already being built.

This is really discouraging and it can put you into a toxic cycle of coming up with ideas and end up never building anything, specially when most of the ideas you come up with are being built by a team at a VC-funded company and you're "just a solo indie hacker".

What helped me is to realize that if you had an idea that has been built, it means you're doing something well.

It means you're looking at the right problems and coming up with the right solutions, so your ideas could potentially be successful, don't get discouraged, keep doing what you're doing!

If your idea has been built, check for need gaps in their solution

Finding that your idea has already been built is not always a bad thing, it can lead you to a similar idea or a new idea in the same market.

Some of the things I've built have been slight pivots of existing ideas to cater for an audience that the existing solutions are not catering for.

You can find these gaps by talking to their customers, browsing their support forums, reading reviews on their products.

Most of the big products nowadays have a feature request section where there's one or two requests that have a lot of popularity but are not being done for whatever reason.

Lots of successful projects are just filling a need gap in an existing product, a great example of this is Pull Panda, a tool for teams using GitHub that sends reminders to teammates in Slack to review Pull Requests. The idea was profitable and it was later acquired by GitHub.

Think of ideas as solutions to problems, not as a product or set of features

A set of features implement a solution, but they're not the solution. Thinking about your idea in terms of features can be bad.

For every idea that I have, I think about what people are trying to accomplish with it.

As an example of this in practice, I had an idea recently about building a service that takes your Google Sheets or Airtable data and exposes it as an API, after doing some research I found out that it had been done before (no kidding, there are like 10 services that do the exact same thing).

Thinking about it some more, I realized that most of the time, people don't want to build an API, they only do so to build a website, it's a means to an end, so why not skip the API building and allow people to build a website using Google Sheets or Airtable data, that's why I am building Frontdeck.

In this case, building a website with your existing data is the problem and a website builder that can work with the data is the solution, an API is just a feature that helps you build a website.

It's important to understand who your audience is, because obviously there are those users that actually want an API, but that's not who I am targeting. The problem I was solving shifted so my target market also shifted.

The good thing about thinking about it this way is that you can always go deeper, why do people want to build a website? probably to advertise their business. Why do they want to advertise their business? all those questions can help you come up with an idea.

This concept is explained in more detail in the Jobs to be done by Intercom.

Scratch your own itch

This is a very effective way of coming up with new ideas, you don't really have to do anything, just carry on with your life until you encounter a problem, then solve it for yourself and make it a product.

Working on solving your own problem also keeps you motivated to work on it, nothing is worse than the feeling of working on something that you're never going to use, I have done this countless times with small projects and I've always ended up burnt out.

Most successful businesses have been built on existing ideas

Finally, just a reminder that everything is a remix.

I've only learned this in practice when I released something that was done before, but doing some things better made it successful.

Lots of examples of this in the interviews section of Indie Hackers :)

Happy new year to everyone, hope some of this is useful to people!