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

Out of the frying pan, and into the fire?

Be very careful when you feel desperate. It's a recipe for bad decisions.

Long-term: sooner, softer, smoother. Recognizing and addressing issues sooner means you can make smaller adjustments.

Short-term: consider treating your current situation as your role learning experience. If you as a developer don't own the product, who does? Why isn't that you? If you think you can build a business on your own, you should be able to be the product owner within your company (and then you'll have plenty of resources if the product is worth something). If you do that, you'll have the experience needed to head out on your own if that's what you really want.

If you scoff that you could never do it in your company because those roles are filled, it's corrupt, etc., then treat the situation as your emotional learning experience: i.e., even if the company is as bad as you think, assume it's the best opportunity you'll ever get. How can you be the one that spins straw into gold? Build your own agency. It's unlikely you can afford better collaborators on your own dime.

Finally, the value stream always branches and branches. You can always go smaller to avoid competition, or bigger to divide a larger pie (typically into smaller pieces). If you want to extract value. But is that what you want?

If you want to build your brand, create something critical for someone important, retaining the credit and the credibility. For success and satisfaction, it's likely more important whose team you're on than what you do. And for that, you never, ever want to seem or be desperate to leave.

Whether building products for people or working with collaborators, think about things from their perspective: that's consideration (both emotional and as exchanged in contracts). Empathy for others is the master virtue, and you might find it helps you avoid thinking of working for a company as working on something that doesn't belong to you.

Agreed: you don't want to create a solution to a hypothesized problem that doesn't actually exist. My point is that there are low hanging fruit if you step outside your immediate bubble, but — as you say — you'll need a guide.

I bought it.

I was tired of spinning wheels trying to validate ideas.

I have experience working in a commodity business. And I tend to believe most things fall in this category.

You can differentiate yourself based on various factors, but the fact that other solutions exists is a good sign. You don't need to create an entire market to sell your product.

Do your product really well, but don't get hung up on it. Learn and lean into good client service. That will create the most opportunity as you expand.

You are running a business not a product.

Have you looked into the niche CRM Space?

The same thing doesn't matter if it brings value. But find a some projects as freelance consultant at a few non tech corps; you'll find many profitable ideas to build. Funnier still; you will notice that these companies never even heard of the things you think the market is saturated with. Give me a few bucks every time I have had to explain there are tools to know if your 10000 marketing sites around the globe are actually up, not hacked etc, and I would have some nice holiday money. Most of these companies have MS and some ERP (by MS or Oracle or SAP etc) and that's it. They don't know anything. I have sold the same product to a bunch of departments in the same company; of course they don't talk to eachother so.