How do you find your indie hacking inspiration?
I often see indie hackers get stuck, either on a day to day basis, or generally coming up with ideas for a business or product.
I thought it would be useful to have a discussion around this.
For me, I've mostly stolen ideas, don't we all?
- I love communities, so I go searching how other communities function. What they talk about, how they engage. IH is a great example of this. However, I also look for gaps in where communities could exist.
- Every website I visit, I question their business model and I have a nosey about to see how they do things. I also ask myself if the things they do would apply to my business.
- I don't really pay attention to my competition, rather I seek other places to borrow ideas from to help us stand out more
- I often browse websites that sell websites/businesses (like Flippa or 1kProjects) and apply my curiosity to how they make money (or not).
- blog posts and newsletters - I pay attention to what people write about and how they are doing it. Often it can help inspire me in my own marketing/writing efforts.
How or where do you find inspiration?
#ask-ih
I usually start with a problem I am having, or something I am trying to do that can't be easily done. Usually it's a recurring thought, I try to screen out ideas that pop up, though I might take some notes or voice notes. When it's come back to me a few times over a week or two, sometimes months, it comes on my radar.
Then I dig into it a little and see if there are solutions I haven't known about before. If still looks good, I will ask some peers and pop a survey out to some folks on FB and get some quick feedback. Then I make a decision if my assumptions are still good enough to move on!
Communities are a great way. To get inspired I usually go on Dribbble.
Day to day: there's no way but forward.
Product:
Existing products (how big are they, are they doing too much? What can I strip them from and improve that last bit?)
Cold email for interviews (has not gone well at all)
Search for common problems on Upwork (found a few, considering one, but this is competing with my new obsession with a community to learn programming)
Looking at my own pain points - not being able to stick to learning to code. For some reason I just get bored / distracted / lose track of where I was and forget everything (inconsistent). Thinking of gamifying my own experience in hopes of getting motivated to stick to a schedule.
Talking to other founders and developers (spoke to 2 people from IH, another tomorrow, and one from HN who is also an IHer, cool guy, we've been exchanging thoughts and had a chat).
IH is basically my church. Side note: it would be nice to talk to more founders .. maybe in a conference call of sorts, but informal and relaxed, successful and struggling founders. I can never make the office hours chat :(
Note on the side note: There have been some online events like this Worldwide meetup I'll ponder some ideas, what did you have in mind?
I like workflows, so I have a whole process for that:
Every week I go on social media (IH, reddit...) and trend websites (Medium trends, google trends) and I look what people are speaking about. I contribute as well (like now). I do around 3 to 4 pomodoros per week (1H15) depending on my task prioritized for the week.
I write every idea I can have / see into a mindmap (which is part of my "idea generation system", I wrote about it on my blog. See "A real life example of an idea system".
I write pain points which create debates or "big" discussions. I look at the number of upvotes as well to see if the subject is interesting for a lot of people. I have another "pain point" mindmap where I put the URL of the discussion, the number of upvotes and some notes.
I try to listen to people and note problems / pain points in real life.
I'm interested in a lot of things so, sometimes, I try to link some knowledge from a specific domain to another one, to create original (or totally stupid) ideas.
The big advantage to use mindmaps is: you can link things to each other. It works very well for me. Of course it's very quickly a mess but I don't hesitate to delete / re-organise things.
More and more these ideas and pain points create big "balls" of ideas all linked together. I create often a project (problems with possible solution) out of it and I prioritize it. I might never do anything with it, but it's there.
I really enjoy the whole process a lot! That's the most important to me.
you might want to check the projects at https://projectilo.com/ for some inspiration, we are a community of makers
Awesome question!
If by inspiration, you mean "inspiration for a product" then I do the following...
find a group of potential customers I'm interested in or have expertise in. Either I've been in their shoes before (eg marketing teams at a startup), or I really find the field interesting (eg gyms).
Spend time really understanding their pain points, priorities and business model. On a very basic level, what are the moving pieces and levers that are the difference between success and failure for them?
Here's where I differ from a lot of common startup advice... I actively look for pain-points/areas where the potential customer doesn't have access to good information. A black hole in their work, if you will. That's the kind of place you can solve a really big pain-point really quickly with little competition, because it isn't somewhere your customers think solutions might exist
Then I learn all about that area of the business. How can I save the customer time or increase their profits by solving that pain point? Often, it begins with improving visibility into that area for the customer.
Spend some time selling around that pain-point to my group of potential customers, and I'll normal stumble across a product they want to pay for...