Ask HN: Solopreneurs, how did you come up with your idea?

A couple of things to consider:

- Business is more about execution than being the first to market with an idea. Marketing, customer satisfaction, pricing, reliability, ect, all come into play. Before you create, spend time looking at the "dozens of other solutions doing the same thing." You may find a weakness, unfulfilled need, niche, ect. Often times, in early markets with lots of players, the first movers have a lot of baggage that holds them back from growing.

(IE, the first movers made a lot of false starts and end up with Frankenstien products. You can "bypass" them by better understanding the market and building something with less functionality, but just enough functionality to meet most of the market's needs. This is a huge advantage because you aren't wasting time fixing a feature that only 2-3 people use, or making sure you don't break that one feature that 2 people use.)

- Look at books like "The Incredible Secret Money Machine" by Don Lancaster or "Start Small, Stay Small" by Rob Walling.

- Read through (and watch) a lot of YC material about starting a business. Although it isn't focused on solopreneurs, a lot of the concepts are very similar.

Me: I realized that I enjoy joining a company early and turning the MVP into an industrial-strength product.

Product's built based on brainstorming: NEVER worked.

Product built around solution to actual problems I've experienced: Always worked, BUT may not have a large enough TAM.

The best way to actually find problems to solve is to replicate something else (as a learning process to actually find the real product you need to build), or talk to people who have problems: e.g. Try an replicate a product with relatively simple core functionality all the way-end-to-end.

During that process you'll probably discover paint point that aren't addressed by any product.

Example from building: Build some GenAI based app that allows users to upload a video and have it "horrified." There may only be a small market in that, but the framework you build to do it could be productized (or subsets of the problem). A simple to use full stack solution where folks can focus on the image / video generation model prompting fine tuning, and then one-click deploy that model wrapped in a whitelabeled ios app with monetization built-in, etc. Example from talking: Lot's of buddies have challenges with bringing AI based coding tools into the organization because most don't support on-prem. Is there an on-prem solution that acts like a DMZ? That is, Cursor team could securely deploy their models to containers running on on-prem hardware (with layers of physical and software security to prevent exfiltration of the model weights), while companies can load their propriety data into another container. Win-win.

Unless you went to Stanford and are going to secretly use your family office as the seed round and lead investor to scam VCs into thinking there is demand for your funding round, then making up problems and solutions isn’t for your socioeconomic class

Engineers like to build stuff. But business is about solving OTHER people's problems. It's not necessarily about building cool stuff.

Get some real world experience. Learn where the holes are. Then build a business around filling the holes.