If you do not know what to do, make a startup for startups.
If you're thinking about making a profitable online project, but you're stuck for ideas, here's a suggestion: create a startup for other startups.
Why?
- Easy idea hunt: Don't stress about coming up with a groundbreaking concept. Just pick any existing startup tool and clone it. You don't even need to make it better.
- Friendly crowd: The startup community is super welcoming. You'll make friends here fast.
- Innovation cravers: Startups are always on the lookout for new tools to boost their marketing efforts or save time. They're ready to discover and invest in new solutions (e.g. yours).
- Easy to market: Tell about making your startup and attract other startup founders (aka build in public).
Or just do cold outreach — it works too. I often check new tools which are offered to me by strangers. - Niche Hangouts: There are plenty of niche communities within the startup world, like Product Hunt, where you can find potential clients.
- Charge more: With startup clients, you can charge more. Just think, 50 clients at $100 per month could mean a solid $5,000 in monthly revenue.
$100 is nothing for a startup, even outside of the US. But you never make, for example, a teacher pay you this amount.
I used this approach back in 2018 when I started my own website builder. I made it tailored for startup owners only.
Along the way, I met founders of other website builders targeting different groups like teachers, offline businesses, handymen etc. They faced more challenges and made way less money.
I see where this post is coming from.
The problem is that al lot of us don't have specific industry knowledge to pull off a tool that actually solves a problem for a specific niche.
@levelsio used to say that we need to do more crazy stuff to see different problems to solve. Our experiences are too similar.
My brain started to generate music startup ideas when I started making music.
But someone's brain just do not produce ideas. We are all different. Some see a problem and come up with a solution. Some don't.
This going to be a crash course on how to find and execute idea to be a business. Before we start there are few rules to understand
The Rules :
Failure is inevitable. You will fail to find a good idea at first. The process is to iterate on first idea until it worked out.
Speed is the most important thing. You want to fail fast and reach your destination fast for that speed is important. To understand how important speed is check this out : When Building MVP, Speed is the Focus
For starting, you don't need product you need validation. If you need to build product for validation then build it, else a google form, blog posts, excel will do the jobs.
Since you understand the rule now lets go to the steps
The steps :
Go to reddit and find a subreddit that most related to you. The one that you understand the most.
From that checkout the posts with highest engagement, more comment more like dislike etc.
Check out what the posts is talking about and what the comment is talking about from this you will understand what people are concern about and what they care about.
Now come out with an idea that can help you to be in the conversation, a product, tshirt or anything that can be related to the things people in the posts talking about.
Now you have a business idea and who you are going to target and which subreddit you want to target.
Now go to creativeblogtopic.com. Here you can insert the business that you want to build and then the target customer and then it will automate google trend analysis for you and give you the best keywords and topics to write for the business.
Time to validate your idea go back to the subreddit now posts something about related to the topic and keywords and see the engagement growing.
If it get people attention then now reply people in the comment asking if there interested to try your upcoming product.
Iterate. Remember speed is very important. You need to move fast. All the tools above will help you move fast.
Here are my simple step on how to get idea, validate and build fast and quick. There are some extension to these like built product only on weekend etc ( there is a reason for this) but that we save for the next time.
If you want in detail about the how to find idea on reddit check this out Struggling for Idea? Here’s How to Extract Ideas from Reddit
If you don't know what to do, you've failed by default.
Following the points in this post, one will only create a solution in search of a problem. A bad approach, basically. :)
Agreeable 🙂 But there are many beginning makers who have no idea where to start from. They make yet another todo lists or solve problems of tiny markets.
My advice is for such folks.
In the gold rush - sell shovels.
Haha yes. Though the startup market is shrunk nowadays. But it is still huge.