How to come up with new saas ideas?

Today stumbled upon this article, long read but good thoughts!
http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

On the practical side of things, if ideas are a function of your experiences and observing others' struggles, here are some suggestions:

• Try consulting, observe problems on the inside of a business
• Have hobbies, through which you learn problems within a niche (at depth)
• Develop your career and identify problems that travel with you (if you're still early in your career). As long as you don't level with the status quo and question broken processes, you'll find something worth solving
• Belong to communities. Solving your own problem is great but seeing others' with your own struggles is even greater
• Develop a habit of writing down ideas. Ideas come and go. But if you don't write them down, you'll lose them forever
• Research recent products. What seems to be in trend? Are there combinations of ideas that multiply value? Of course, you should have a bias towards areas you'd actually like to be in 😊

First, stop trying to come up with "new SaaS ideas".

There are three fundamental problems with how you're thinking right now:

1. "New" implies that you've already ruled out ideas that aren't new. That doesn't mean you need to copy someone else's idea. You're not trying to steal an idea. You're just filling part of the market that someone else hasn't. It means that you're allowed to open a new coffee shop even if someone else has a coffee shop down the road.

2. "SaaS" is a business model. There are many, many successful businesses that don't follow the SaaS model. The reason those businesses are successful is because they solve real world problems. Start by finding problems to solve and think about the suitable business model later.

3. "Ideas" are not the starting point. Ideas are the second step to solving problems. Once you know what problem you're trying to solve, only then should you start thinking of ideas to solve it.

It's okay. Most people start where you are now. The next step is to shift your mindset so that you start seeing the world as problems to be solved. Once you start seeing things through this new lens, ideas will come.

When you nail this new mindset, you'll have more ideas than you know what to do with. The challenge then is picking the problem that you'd most like to solve. This means finding something you're capable of building that interests you enough to stick it out for the long haul.

By interfacing with customers and finding their pain points.

Then focusing on marketing your mvp.