Ask HN: How to start SaaS or software business?

It looks like there is SaaS for everything you can think of AND something that other consumers or business would pay for. Time management, project management, education courses, ads, no-code dev. You name it and you will find it.

I am good at execution and getting things done. But, I am not sure what to build or where to invest time and money such that it pays off in 6-12 months. I have been involved in backend work and have good knowledge of "how to use" cloud like AWS.

It is said that you scratch your own itch. But, I don't know if that will pay or not to create successful business.

Thoughts on gathering or finding profitable ideas that can scale up to 1-10 MM revenue in 5 years?

Sales Safari?

Talk to people outside your field about their problems? There was a guy on a professional machinist's forum where I hang out who simply asked "How can I help you with an IT problem?" and IIRC, the resulting thread is over 20 pages long. He's probably gotten tons of business by simply offering free IT help over the internet.

Go places where programmers aren't!

Got a link to that thread? A few of my buddies are machine shop owners, and I would love to see what they said.

Since you're asking for some sort of advice, take any idea you come up with and validate it.

The only way of validation is getting paid. Don't write any line of code before getting payment.

You can accomplish very much with current available tooling.

If your project requires some sort of implementation, don't spent more than two weeks on it. You could create landing and forms using services as typeform and others. Then gather several hundreds of signups and talk to this people.

The failing rate is high and last thing you want is to spend 2 years on validating your idea.

As a technical founder it'll be hard to avoid hacking right away but the coding skill is required only if you get after validation stage.

Try to come up with idea per day, then at the end of the month pick most promising and validate it.

Thanks for digging that up! I actually remember reading that thread a while back. Most of that thread is "my computer is broken", but their are a couple nuggets of gold in there.