My (Heavily-Borrowed) Approach to Finding A Business Idea

I recently decided to leave my job as a Product Manager to pursue building a startup full-time!! I had been trying to kick things off on the side (nights and weekends), but my co-founders and I just weren't making progress as quickly as I would have liked. Luckily, I had been saving up for many years to pursue my own ideas and I live in a double-income household, so I decided to take the leap even before I had traction on a particular idea. 😅(I'm very fortunate to be able to make a decision like this)

So now, I’m working on figuring out what's next and planning on sharing what what I'm learning.

In this post, I thought I'd share how I'm approaching finding business ideas.

Everything below is heavily borrowed from these Microconf talks by Patrick McKenzie and Justin Jackson that made a lot of sense to me:

1. Your First 60 Days by Patrick McKenzie
2. An Unconventional Way to Validate Your Product Idea by Justin Jackson

The first step for me is to find a customer that I want to serve.

This means finding customers who:

1. I would be excited to work for everyday
2. have tractable problems
3. have paid money to solve those problems

In the past, I have explored serving junior developers as a customer. While I love helping junior devs, I’ve learned that they don't often reach for paid software solutions. (I'm still always ready to help, I just don't plan on trying to make a business by charging them)

So, I’m putting together a list of potential customers (such as bootcamps, recruiters, tech managers, and others) that could fit the 3 criteria mentioned above. Now, I'm reaching into my network, twitter, and slack groups to talk to people with those backgrounds.

Key questions I've been asking:

1. What's the last product, service, or tool you bought for work?
2. What's the least favorite tool you have to use right now?
3. What kinds of tasks are you currently doing in Excel?

In the past week, I've had more than 16 calls (!!) from people in my network. These calls were invaluable, introducing me to different worlds, problems, and solutions. They also helped me calibrate the three criteria so that I can prioritize, focus, and dig deeper into the problems of one particular customer. I've got more calls lined up this week, so hope to have more updates for y'all in the weeks to come.

If you have any thoughts or feedback, happy to hear it!