Software Developer wanting to escape! (Idea Validation)
Hey everyone 👋
Long time lurker, I have decided to post and put myself out there.
Short summary of who I am, Software Developer based in Scotland. Make a fairly decent living, but like everyone, would love to escape that 9 to 5 life and working to make someone else money.
For years I have scoured the forum, read all the amazing stories about how people reaching crazy goals and for me I just struggle to come up with that unicorn idea that I love but in reality that will probably not come.
Technically I can believe I have the ability to deliver a decent Web Application since it's my day to day job. I have "started" a bunch of ideas, purchase domain names, setup repo's, start hosting and really it never get's further than that. I have no excuse other than losing motivation fairly quickly.
My goal in posting today is to hopefully start conversations with other like minded people and get more involved and hopefully motivate myself to start hacking away.
Here is my idea, which I will prefix with, do I think this idea is going to make me rich? Chance's are no. But it's a start, and maybe something i can replicate across different niches. Also, is it a unique idea, probably not, can I make a better than option than what's out there, I would like to think so.
App idea is a management platform for Dog Walking business's. Feature's such as managing customer's and their dogs, type, nature etc. Organising walking schedules. Client side to book, cancel, view photos of walk.
It's not a crazy idea or anything, minimal features, but it should cover the grounds of what you would expect from a SaaS, authentication, payments, user management, emails etc.
Apologies for the very long winded post, but please say Hi in the comment's and share your thought's. I look forward to providing an update in the near future 😁
Do you have customers in mind? Like actual dog walkers who you could call up and hound (pun intended lol) to become alpha / beta users and eventually customers? I'd start there - are they using some other tool? What do they like about it? What do they dislike about it? I'd start there for this idea.
And if you are not married to this idea, I'd recommend doing something like the 12 startups in 12 months challenge. It helps to keep it more fun and serves as a good warm up.
Best of luck!
My brother in law for one is intending to start his own walking business, but other than that I do notice quite a-lot of them. I am no delusion that this could make me tons of money, the possible customers could be very limited. But my thinking is, starting to build and ship something is better than sitting around forever and never delivering anything, so it get's me going anyway.
I have always liked the idea of 12 in 12 challenge. Maybe I could turn this into part of that, but I guess getting over that first one is a big hurdle, at-least in my eyes.
Thanks for the comment :)
Honestly, I don't think this is a right approach. Imagine, if you pick up the wrong idea ("means" where are too many competitors, or too few customers, or something that will not make you living) you will feel disappointed and devastated.
Instead, I would suggest to make some research. It still can be consider as "doing something" but it may move the vector of your effort in a more right direction.
Try not to build anything during a week. Collect the ideas, look around, read forums and communities you are interested in, try to figure out what people are struggling with.
Write down the ideas.
After one week, review your list. Try to estimate all the ideas by several criteria like "how hard to implement", "N of competitors", "my interest in it" and so on. Pick up the idea requiring the least amount of time and scoring most.
Don't start building yet! Find at least one potential customer and talk to him/her about his/her problems (not about your ideas). See if it fits your thoughts.
Don't start building yet! Do research on marketing. Answer honestly, what you should do to achieve the potential customers. Cold emails? Cold calls? Ads? Posts? Estimate if you are able to do it. Create an approximate plan.
Only here, if everything looks good, start building. Build no more than 1, max 2 months. If you see you can't follow the plan, stop and pick up other idea.
Hey man, I'll be honest and say that for most part of it, I felt like I am reading my own thoughts in this post. I can totally understand and relate with you. And finally decided to get my hands dirty and try to find motivation from one weekend to another to continue working on a side project and shaping it to a SaaS (mentioned about this just few days back as my first post on Indiehackers).
My idea isn't something that could be a unicorn that's for sure but I find this as positive because I don't want to become overwhelmed with the complications that the project might face in the very first SaaS project and end up losing the hope to even finish it.
Bottom line for me is, I am happy to fail and learn something and improve. That is my motivation to keep on grinding on this project.
If it's something you can resonate with then you can as well follow with a similar mindset of this.
PS: I like the idea of @saq7 of 12 startups in 12 months challenge. I will consider this once I create the first project so I have the boilerplate for the most basic things needed in a SaaS. Thanks for that.
Awesome to hear I am not the only one. My thinking is now I have not thought about ideas and stuff forever and never done anything about it, so. my not amazing idea, is still better than nothing and like you can say it's a learning opportunity.
Good luck and I will keep an eye out for you :)
Thanks and Good luck to you too.
Shoot me a message if you want to discuss about anything. :)
Just my 2 cents. I have been building different products for years, some in the enterprise space, some in the B2C, and some in the B2 small B space. I realized the successful products for me were products where I could easily access the market. For me, that was predominantly the enterprise space. That was because I worked in that space, had contacts there, and people knew my work and were more than happy to listen when I pitched a new product or idea.
I do not have that kind of leverage in the B2C or B2 small B space (I am actively trying to change that now, though).
So my suggestion would be this, rather than thinking about the product you want to build. Think of your network or the places you can access easily. Then think of problems they have and work to fix that.
A product without market access is just way too hard to sell. And you will end up getting demotivated with the lack of traction.
Good advice, as well as bryan's below. I guess we tech people are mostly in the same boat as the post owner: for us it is very easy to start building the product so we tend to go there first. Then we get unmotivated as we realize there is no feedback or market to fit to.
The lesson to learn for us is to dig into the market and the problem first. Get out there, talk to the dog walkers on the park, talk to the dog owners, realize their needs.
Imagine that the product is already created and go get the customers.
Exactly. I found that I had to quit tech to focus on sales and marketing entirely. Otherwise, I found myself slowly retreating to tech. Like a few days back, I saw a new version of vuejs was out, and my hands have been itching to try it out. But I told myself that if I needed something built, it either had to be no-code or outsourced.
I just started the de-addiction process a month or two ago. So let's see how it goes.
Hey mate, don't beat yourself up over it because in reality most ideas aren't unicorn ideas. Based on your post I can suggest trying to take a different approach.
Take some time to actually think about the problem/area you are trying to fill, rather than tunnel-visioning on building the product (e.g. purchasing domains, writing code). You may be finding it difficult to sustain motivation without some type of vision on what value you are creating.
That's just my suggestion anyway! Good luck.
If you are a young company or team wondering where to hire developers for startup? Then I can recommend them to you https://vitechteam.com/how-to-hire-the-development-team-for-your-startup/ . After all, it is a powerful and global company that helps not only businesses, but also startups to develop and program their own software developments. Support at all stages of development and correct any flaws or errors that may occur during the creation process.
I'm going to be a bit blunt but you are expressing negative thoughts by saying that "it's probably not going to make money","it's probably not going to be a unicorn".
You need to get into the right mindset, you're thinking about money and comparing your idea to what's already out there. Every company that ever became a unicorn didn't set out to become one. They just put their product out there to the right people, kept improving it and they eventually became unicorns through network effects.
I'm a developer as well and to be honest, development creates tunnel vision, you only focus on code when the truth is no one cares about the code, the framework or the database.
It really comes down to switching the mindset from developer to entrepreneur. Most entrepreneurs have ideas about stuff they want to put out in the world but can't build it. On the other hand Developers can build things but have no ideas.
You can already build things and you already have an idea. All you need is to validate your idea and if no one is interested, come up with another idea and keep going until you have people that are interested in your idea.
Instead of thinking about money, think about solving problems, putting your ideas out there, and validating them.
I think it can be feasible. Just don't go global. Do something for your local community - and if you aren't in a big enough city, maybe the closest city to you. That's the only way to kickstart it properly. If you make it work in one location even with a little profit, you know you can turn it into a global service.
Most people quit because they are trying to come up with an idea. You will have a better success rate if you switch your focus from trying to come up with an idea to try to serve an existing need in the market.
Every market has its own set of problems and if you will solve that problem, you have a winner on your hand.
I'm doing the exact same thing with https://chromeextensionideas.substack.com/
Problem: I saw that a lot of indie hackers try to come up with an idea without doing market research and are failing because of that.
Solution: I started a newsletter where I spend more than 14 hours per week analyzing different markets and share 3 ideas that the market is already asking for.
This framework gives you a hungry audience waiting for your solution so you just need to build the solution and serve them.
Give it a try.
It sounds great as a pet project (pun intended) to ship a fully-featured app that solves a neatly contained problem.
As a business, I'm not so sure - but I don't know this area well. Are there enough "professional dog walkers" out there that you can find, who would pay you a decent subscription for this? My gut feeling is no, and that most dog walkers would be doing it for a bit of extra pocket money (i.e. young folks) and want to keep their overheads as minimal as possible. But that's an assumption.
Like you say though, it may be a good app to develop and then pivot into a space that makes more financial sense. Doggy day care / pet hotel management app perhaps.
Think you have summed it up really, i am no delusion this will have massive earning potential, but I just want to get going, do something and deliver and hopefully down the line pivot to other ideas.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.