How you can find a business idea in 20 minutes
Today I wanna show you how to find an idea for your new startup that has a market fit and is needed for people. I know how many makers are not good at this, cause you just don’t know what people really want.
You have to build a product, spend months in development, spend money on marketing campaigns and only then you’ll understand that your idea is valid. It’s time consuming and difficult.
But here is one hack which I’ve found while making Startup Growth KIT(my new secret product about growth strategies).
- Go to Product Hunt. Choose a product topic where you wanna make a product. For example I decided to choose design tools.
- Here is a list of design products on PH. Choose the ‘most upvoted‘ option.
- Now you can browse and search for the best design products. If they are the most upvoted, then they have had validated their ideas by the PH community. And you can get an inspiration for your idea, or even rebuild some of them cause a lot of products are not living now, and you can turn ideas to life again!
Example
Again. We wanna create a design product. We need a valid idea. Go to Product Hunt, Most Upvoted Design Products, and here we find a good one.
Wow, 2442 upvotes! There is a high probability that this idea is valid cause the product has so many upvotes! Guys made a product which provides developers with 10 super responsive email templates. The pricing looks pretty good.
How many customers did they have? As they say, more than 1000+. Which means they’ve made at least $5000+ in revenue.
So, the idea with responsive email templates works! What can you do? Make this idea better with your own features, for your audience. May be an email template generator for SaaS only founders, or a collection of 100+ templates for B2B sales for LinkedIn audience! There are a lot of features and options, but the main idea — providing email templates works!
And you can use this hack with all types of products and ideas. Just go to Product Hunt most upvoted products section, find a good product, read comments, customers, and come to think with you own implementation! And be not afraid — you’re not a stealer if you’ll make your own product with your new design, features and options. An idea worths nothing, only a product!
Use it! And subscribe to my newsletter if you wanna get more hacks like this — maxrand.web.app
What do you think about this strategy?
The fatal flaw in this process is in Step (3)
Product Hunt votes are not customer validation. They are just a signal that somebody thinks your idea is cool, or your description was punchy, or your icon was cute.
Don't confuse an upvote with real validation.
Yeah, you're right, but I've seen like 300+ most upvoted products and most of them still working and have customers, so yeah upvotes are not a validation but if a product has more upvotes it means it has a higher probability of a validation based on observes
However, there's def a correlation.
+1. PH upvotes have nothing to do with validation.
I would say there is definitely a correlation. A product with zero interest and no upvotes would on average perform worse than one with 1000+ votes.
Hi Max,
Thanks for sharing.
A related idea might be to offer to purchase products that had some interest on Product Hunt in the past. It would probably save a lot of time compared to starting from zero and I suspect that the majority of those products are abandoned after a year or so.
I think Nathan Latka said that he searches for listings on ProductHunt from 6 months ago to see if they might be intersted in selling.
John
Wow, that's sounds very interesting
Max, thank you a lot for this article.
You really help me and your website in the end are great)
wow, interesting! i've been using the same way once only on hacker news. it really works yet the main thing is to not to copy a product itself.
Thank you! Exactly! You just find an idea and make a better implementation with your new features, UX, design and for your audience.
agreed. anyway, there are a lot of copycats on PH so I think it really does not matter so much for newbies, they have to train first IMO
Interesting idea! Thanks for sharing Max. Have you personally used this technique? How did it go for you?
I've found like 5 ideas that I'd liked and now I'm making a product and have like 2 sales before release.
Also, I've found many copycats of some most upvoted products on PH, and yes they have customers
That's great! Glad to hear it's actually working. Congrats!
Very interesting! I’ve been struggling with coming up with a new idea for a while now. Thanks so much!
Happy to help ;)
Funny that I used to do this on Indiehacker when it was only an interview platform. Although I never got any progress with it. I think the reason why is because it’s not my idea so the moment I found a roadblock I just gave up and look for a new idea.
lol
Well, I think this post is so strong.
It's not big and very helpful at the same time.
Thank you!
This comment was deleted 3 months ago.