Struggling to figure out what to build? Here are 7 ideas inspired by Pain Points.

One of the most common questions Indie Hackers ask themselves is:

"What should I build?"

I think one interesting way to answer that question is to interview people from all walks of life and understand what challenges and frustrations they have.

Each week I conduct 1:1 interviews with people from all walks of life, including but not limited to, entrepreneurs, consultants, teachers, students, marketers, software engineers, designers, and other technologists.

Below is a sample of a report I created that focused on the Pain Points related to Personal Knowledge Management.

Key Insights

Note-taking and personal knowledge management systems are experiencing a renaissance. People are actually paying up to five thousand dollars to learn how to build a second brain.

Once Notion and Roam release public APIs the productivity world is going to explode. There will be a lot of opportunities to build on top of these platforms. This space will be a playground for IndieHackers.

Apps like Readwise will become much more popular as more and more individuals start understanding the benefits of workflows.

The mobile experience for most tools is in this space is not great. Folks are sounding off and dreaming big.

A major challenge of implementing a PKM system or framework is getting all of your book highlights, favorite Twitter threads, bookmarks, references, articles, podcast quotes, etc. into one central database.

Featured Quotes from Participants

Connecting all of the tools you need to Build a Second Brain, isn't ideal. The ecosystem feels fragmented.

How do you filter all of the information coming at you? That might be the golden question.

The goal of organizing information up-front is to save time down the road when I want to write about a particular topic. When I sit down to write, most of the work should already be done. I hate starting from a blank page.

Most products don't have opinions on how you should organize your information. It's all on the user to get it right.

Not being to take air quotes from audiobooks is frustrating. Readwise has a workaround which isn't ideal.

The open-endedness of Notion is both a blessing and a curse. One thing I waste too much time on is restructuring how I organize information. You can infinitely get stuck in this cycle. You can always organize things again and then re-organize them. It can be a bit paralyzing.

I'm missing version control. It would be ideal if you didn't have to manually copy and paste the same content everywhere in order to play with different versions of a blog post your iterating on.

What's most challenging currently is the role of Roam in my stack. I've been experimenting with it for the past four months. I know I'm only tapping a limited amount of its capabilities, but I also question whether I need all the features and if it's worth the cost as well as what it takes to learn how to use it more fully.

With Evernote, I find it pretty disorganized, I end up repeating a lot of my own analysis and thoughts. I generally don't go back to look through my notes from more than a week back. Besides being a way to just channel and filter my thoughts, it's not great as an actual repository of my thinking. It's taken me a while to come up with a Google sheets template that works for tracking my progress, and tracking lessons I have learned. I had several versions that tracked useless things that really didn't help me focus on the right things.

It strikes me that the fact that I'm not organizing my thoughts and insights has probably been eating away at me in the back of my mind. I don't spend enough time thinking about changes I could make to improve it. Spending some time every few weeks to think about the process itself is probably one of the best ways to improve.

Another annoying thing about Notion is the search feature. It's horrible. It's of course super slow. But this is not the problem. It's not really able to find the stuff you want because it's not fuzzy. You have to search exactly what you're looking for and sometimes I don't remember the exact words I used prior.

When it comes to having a "Second Brain", I think that it's an incredible advantage if you have one. You're basically starting on third base.

I write my notes in either Notion or Apple's Notes, and I also enjoy writing notes by hand from time to time. I try to take them in bullet points and then I usually polish them right after while it's all still fresh in my mind. I use Notion both in my professional and personal life.

Ideas & Opportunities

1. A lot of people have no idea what personal knowledge management is, or how it could benefit them but once they discover it, they absolutely want the benefits but without the complexity. Build the CodeNewbie of Personal Knowledge Management and help people get started.

2. Create a private community for Indie Thinkers (writers, researchers, and entrepreneurs who are writing and learning in public). These folks are bullish on personal knowledge management. IndieThinkers.org is charging $50 a month for a membership.

3. Build a personal knowledge management course at a more affordable price point than what's out there currently. $250 seems to be a sweet spot for Effortless Output in Roam.

4. Notion, Roam, and similar tools don't have a concept of version control. Build your audience and create content showing people how to flex between different ways of communicating the same thought. In Github, one can have different "branches" of code. Why can't we have different branches of thought to play with? To compare and contrast?

5. It would be cool if there was some kind of "Behind the Scenes" platform for writing where you could see the beginning, middle, and end of a writer's process instead of just the finished result.

6. Sell digital products like Notion Templates and Roam Databases targeted at niche groups. Newsletter OS helps newsletter creators become better organized, save time, and clearly define their North Star.

7. Courses are great, but they aren't personalized. Become a Digital Tool Coach. Offer 1:1 coaching services to help people figure out what kind of personal knowledge management system works best for them. Tools like Superpeer and MentorCruise can help you get started.

If you're interested in (and would pay for) user research data like this, reach out to me at [email protected]. I'm giving away another free report to everyone who reaches out to me there!

Thanks for reading! Hope it was helpful and informative.