Scratching Your Own Itch vs Deliberate Idea Generation
I am curious what the Indie Hacker community has to say about scratching your own itch to generate profitable ideas... Do you think it is THE way to go, or can thinking more deliberately about a market and seeing a gap also be a good option ?
I am an electrical engineer and I am trying to generate ideas in my own industry of renewable energy and power systems, but it is difficult to 'Scratch my own Itch' here... Does that mean I shouldn't pursue ideas as it will be very difficult to find something that will be valuable?
Sorry for the noob question!
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In terms of idea generation it's a good idea to start writing down your ideas even if you think they are not something you want to pursue. The main benefit is getting into the habit of idea generation.
After a while you'll have way more ideas than you can possibly work on but you'll have a much clearer idea of which ideas feel appealing. Sometimes this will be because you really want to build that thing and other times it'll be because you think there's a market for it.
Next you'll want to figure out a way to validate the idea.
Note, I don't like to think of this process as a set of stages. Instead it's an ongoing process where you can come up with new ideas all the time and continue to validate in various different ways.
For example, a good first step to validate the idea is simply to ask others what they think. However, take this feedback with a grain of salt because there's a good chance what people say won't really reflect reality.
Then take it up a notch and build either a landing page or a very basic prototype and ask again. After that feedback build the next bit and ask again and repeat and so on...
Even if you're idea turns out to be a dud you'll learn so much in this process that building the next idea will be easier and you'll have even more ideas based on the feedback you get.
That's my 2 cents anyway.
This is really great advice... I think sometimes I will just dismiss ideas in my own mind before putting them down on paper and it kinda breaks the creative thinking process.
Thank you so much for your input!
In my opinion both are viable options.
The advantage I see in the scratching your own itch route is that you already start with a good sense of what the problem looks like. If the product solves a real problem you face, you will immediately know how good your solution is and what needs to be done.
Solving a problem in a different market would probably require you to obtain feedback early and often. Otherwise you could end up solving a problem, that nobody has or knows about.
I personally would start by scratching my own itch if my product idea wasn't strongly validated by others. That's also the road I am taking. If its going to work, I can't say yet, though.
I can wholeheartedly recommend the newsletter of @arvidkahl for exactly these kinds of questions, when starting out!
Thanks for mentioning my newsletter!
One thing I would like to point out (which I did write about in last week's episode incidentally) is that with developers creating tools to fix their own problems, we often over-estimate how critical out problem is and under-estimate the reluctance of other developers to open their wallets for things that, given enough time, they can figure out for themselves.
In most industries, there is a clear understanding of buying solutions for things you can't or don't want to solve themselves. For developers, particularly if they have limited budgets, it needs to be an exceptionally good and popular product to suppress their natural curiosity and interest in solving the problem themselves. A tough audience to build for.
So knowing your own problems is never truly enough. Most of my dev-related ideas turned out to be very specific to my own experiences and I could not find an audience that had the same problems reliably.
This stage is very tough, but it can be done. Deep reflection, asking people about their problems, all that will get you there. :)
I think really the difference is domain knowledge and how important that is. With scratching your own itch, the assumption is you have knowledge of the area. You're professional experience puts you a lot ahead of others trying to break in, and if you try to break into an area you don't know, you're going to have a lot of domain knowledge to acquire.
Just listened to @csallen interview @Robert_James_Gabriel on the Indie Hacker podcast. This exact topic came up.
What's funny is I recorded the podcast using my app Scribbl.co so it would be easier for me to jump back to important moment. Check out @Robert_James_Gabriel response to your question. Just search "how do you find problems to solve" and press play
https://app.scribbl.co/share/07f597d4-ce21-4af0-9e84-b657edb579f1
I can only speak for myself but I've made a conscious decision to go the "scratching your own itch" route. I do this knowing that it probably is not the optimal business decision. My reasons being:
I really enjoy working on my product and playing it too so it makes it easier for me to stick with it and interact with users.
I figure that even if it does not pan out economically, I'm still doing all the same things I would have to do for a more pragmatic idea so it is a great learning opportunity.
Also, while I'm working away on this idea I do keep a list of potential products from my day time career field, software engineering.
Thank you for taking your time to answer and provide your insight!!
Hi Aleks,
In my opinion, "scratching your own itch" is the easiest path to make something people want.
Given that you are your first user, you know what you need, and don't have to resort to "user research" to know what to build.
You can also ask yourself whether in your current (or previous) job you ever found yourself saying "Why doesn't someone make x?".
If you still want to try to think of startup ideas I recommend you to read "The Mom Test" from Rob Fitzpatrick, it's certainly the best book on user interviews that I've read.
👋
Thanks for replying and the book recommendation!
Something I saw being mentioned somewhere else was that the risk with scratching your own itch is that the product you work on is almost too personal and too specific to you as a person. Do you think there is a risk of that or do you think if you get excited about an idea there are bound to be other people that will also get excited about it?