How did you find the "problem" to solve?

Having a solution and then trying to find a problem is a high-risk approach to doing business.

Scratching your own itch is also risky because the whole assumption that "if you have problem X surely others will too!" often isn't true. Just browse through IH and look at all the people that failed to get their businesses off the ground despite scratching their own itch.

So the approach that has the highest likelihood of success is to start by picking a very specific audience and then researching them.

If you pick a very niched-down set of people, you can figure out where they hang out, what language they use, what they complain about, what they're paying for, and how much they'd be willing to pay.

Using that research, the problem reveals itself kinda like a treasure for an archeologist. It was always there but it needed to be uncovered.

Then the next set of steps would be to earn their trust and start to be seen as the go-to-guy in that space. If you can demonstrate that you can help them by actually helping them, you can start to build a list which you can then present your offer to.

That offer, together with your motivated list, is something you can iterate but it'll likely already be fairly close because it emerged from your research.

Honestly I think this is one of the biggest "tricks" of entrepreneurship. WHAT problem to solve. For one, you should have a bit of savvy in that domain. You should know what generally trips people up and causes issues.

With VCbackME.com the "problem" we're solving is how to get good feedback on startup pitch decks, and find investors. I found this problem talking to people who seem to generally think it's hard for entrepreneurs to raise capital, and listening to entrepreneurs complain about the difficulty.

While reading the "Rework" book I learned about the "Scratch Your Own Itch" idea. Basically you solve your own problem.

Does it always lead to a profitable business? Nah, it doesn't.

Is it a good at keeping you motivated? It certainly is! And at the end, if you build anything, you'll have at least one happy user - that is yourself. 🙂

Another interesting idea, which I learned from the Indie Hackers podcast, is to build specific solutions to some specific problems people are using generic tools for. For instance, if somebody is using Excel a lot, maybe there's some need that could be addressed better with a piece of custom-tailored software.

Good luck!

I'm currently focused on Shopify in this days. And I'm following people which is working with Shopify and reading their tweets. Somehow I'm catching the idea, because they are telling what they need.

So, follow people and read their tweets, this is my method.

By testing & trying out new things.